Modernist 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.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

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 problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.

I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school.

When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant, but minimalism.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

This one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration ... I'm a minimalist in a rapper's body.

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.

I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten.

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure