Frans van Houten Quotes

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

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.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

I love Atlanta. It's a great city with great crews there, but it's really hard to make it into a Las Vegas version of it because it doesn't look at all like Las Vegas.

Urban planning should be done with the mindset that we are determining the city's fabric for 100 years to come.

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

Most of the job on DDP was already done by the time I became mayor. So was Gwanghwamun Square, described by many architects as the city's worst architectural creation, and the new city hall. I did not think that redoing them would be the right approach as that would only create new problems.

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.