Modern Architecture Quotes

When I was 16 and on a tour of Europe, I fell in love with Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. I'd quite like to live in it.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.

When foreign tourists come to Seoul, they will likely want to experience the city more. The city combines past, present and future landscapes that cannot be found elsewhere.

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

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

I always wanted to at least visit Dubai - it was a city that I loved to watch on the Discovery Channel. It had the world's biggest everything and clearly had a vision to stand out.

New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

...Skyscraper National Park

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

I've been to Manchester enough to know it's a real place. It's not Factory Records and the Smiths bicycling around. I get it. It's a modern city.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now—our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy.

Just growing up in Columbus, which is such a special place, small town with a Fortune 500 company's headquarters, the extraordinary modern architecture. The experiences that I've had growing up in that very unique hometown has shaped me and always will shape me.

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.

American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.

If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational.

I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

Dubai's a pretty powerful place.

Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education.