City Structure Quotes

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

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

That power of the Gods which orders for the good things which are not uniform, and which happen contrary to expectation, is commonly called Fortune, and it is for this reason that the Goddess is especially worshipped in public by cities; for every city consists of elements which are not uniform.

London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.

Cities are complex and contain just about any thing or concept ever invented by humans. How the city is built, its topography, and how close you live to your work and a grocery store affects your mobility.

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

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

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

People don't know that New York really is just made up of a group of very small neighborhoods.

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

Paris is not so square. I'm not good at the geography of the city in Paris, so I'm always lost. Here, in New York, you can never be lost. In Paris, even when I walk to my gallery or whatever, I always take another route, because Paris is not built that way.

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city.