City Aesthetics Quotes

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.

In Belgium, we know the U.S. culture through the television, but it's not the truth. It's interesting to see that Philadelphia is really industrial. I love industrial cities. Everybody hates them, but I think they're the best places to be creative. The more gritty it is, the more I love it.

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

I didn't realize Toronto was so beautiful. Everywhere you go you see beautiful architecture.

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.

The problem with shooting in Paris is, it's been shot to death. When you're in it, you already think you're in a movie, so how do you get away from that feeling, and give some frisson to the viewer?

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

I want to move back to the East Coast. I like Venice, but L.A. is ugly. I would kill myself if I had to look out the window and see some places in L.A. every day.

I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.

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.

The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

I love New York, but I don't like how it smells like hot pee and garbage in the summer. I feel like Chicago isn't that way. Maybe I'm just being romantic.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

I never walked through the streets of any city with as much satisfaction as those of Philadelphia. The neatness and cleanliness of all animate and inanimate things, houses, pavements, and citizens, is not to be surpassed.

This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.