Leslie Jamison Quotes

To me, Helsinki is one big movie studio.

There's something very special about seeing history so clearly in front of you through that architecture that you just don't get in the U.S. If I was asked to choose where I'd most like to live, I would always choose London.

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

I don't want to be cliched, but Buckingham Palace is beautiful, and the old red telephone booths are really interesting to me. I've always wanted to see those.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

Left Bank Astana was beautiful at night, each building, it seemed, with its own nighttime color scheme and the street lamps all going full blast.

You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here?

I love Chicago. It's one of the great cities. I'm crazy about the town. It reminds me of New York when it was at its best, the New York that used to be and is no more. I love the architecture, the old stuff and the new stuff.

Buenos Aires is an incredibly kind of fragrant city, a beautiful city to look at, and it has the old and the new.

What I have noticed is that no two places in Calcutta are alike. I like the bylanes and the old places. This city has a lot of character.

Lucknow's architecture is a part of life in the city.

The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.

Barcelona is a beautiful city. I love the buildings and the architecture and always enjoy being close to that. It makes sense as an art person to work in places like that, it always feels nice and creative.

Chicago is complicated and complex and very violent but also very rich with history and tradition and art and culture - it's all these things.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

When I walk up the piazza of Santa Croce I feel as if it were not a Florentine nor an European church but a church built by and for the human race.

These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

Today, architecture is invention. It isn't enough to just be rational - It must also be beautiful.

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.