Norman Foster Quotes

I really don't know the Chicago School. You see, I never walk. I always take taxis back and forth to work. I rarely see the city.

Cities are immortal.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

Certain parts are bad in every city, but Chicago is beautiful.

I really like Pietermaritzburg: it is really a course for me - really technical.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

We then journeyed on to London Street, down which the tidal ditch continues its course.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.