The first day at the power plant I found myself photographing some steam vents on the roof of the structure. And I remember consciously thinking that they were just like trees but they were metal.
God made the country, and man made the town.
What most people don't realize is that dams and other structures are not permanent fixtures on the landscape. They are there because we made a political decision to build them. They didn't get there by accident.
I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.
The Pyramids are perfect, but you can't put the Pyramids in the middle of Manhattan. In the desert, the combination of light and form makes it perfect.
Here at home, we're in a world of right angles and human construct, so whether it's cement or plastic or steel, everything is at an angle. But nature is chaos theory in full play. So having that uniqueness of what nature is gives me a sense of rejuvenation and scale.
Political institutions (however the proposition may be at times ignored) are the work of men; owe their origin and their whole existence to human will. Men did not wake on a summer morning and find them sprung up
Why go to a church to worship God? A church is man made. God never said, "And let there be aluminum siding." Climbing a tree to talk to God sounds like a better idea since only God can make a tree. And if that tree's on a golf course, all the better.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
We built everything - toilets included. I think those islands in the middle of nowhere are quite poetic. It's kind of an Oriental Atlantis.
Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.
Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.
I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth between your toes and know that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you tell to a pile of bricks? The bricks will not be moved (page 87).
Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.
Nature made the fields and man the cities.
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
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.
