Monumental Architecture Quotes

In these highways our engineering will reflect the National Socialist movement.

I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.

MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.

Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.

[Describing the White House:] Big enough for two emperors, one Pope and the Grand Lama.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me 30 years, I could build a bigger one.

If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.

I never expected the White House to be warm, and the artwork on the walls was extraordinary. I am a fan of the Louvre, but being there it was almost just as good.

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

My films have a lot of historical context; I'm a huge fan of ruins. You see a lot of ruin work in my movies, I like ruins.

Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?

Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.

What's fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it's crap-looking - apart from the White House, which is beautiful.

Washington: A city obsessed with the present.

There will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

A painter once told me that I'm like the Khajuraho, which you see once but which remains with you forever. I thought that was exquisite.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

I lived in the south near Tughlaqabad. My father was in the Air Force station. I used to go to Tughlaqabad Fort, and there's a huge city park there a big city forest, near the ruins. They were so beautiful. So I have been to those parks.

Many times, I'd spend the night walking the city streets: the Trevi fountain, in the dark, is so beautiful it moves you, but the Colosseum is my favourite place - you can breathe history there.

The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.