Monumentalism Quotes

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

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

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

I needed to understand the spirit of a tall building, what makes it important, what should I try to achieve in a tall building. It became a very interesting problem, something that I like very much.

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

The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.

In terms of the film itself, there was nothing much very new about 'Star Wars.' 'Star Wars' was a trailblazer for the kind of monumentalist pastiche which has become standard in a homogeneous Hollywood blockbuster culture that, perhaps more than any other film, 'Star Wars' played a role in inventing.

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

The great seats of power tend to be wide and open, not vertical and soaring. Red Square, Tiananmen Square, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin - all massive but with large open spaces that project an image of might.

Architecture aims at Eternity.

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.

Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me.

On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.

It's unfortunate that a certain type of stripped-down classicism became the in-house architectural language for 20th-century fascism. Can an architectural language recover from such an association? Yes, I think it can, because in the end what you're talking about is a column and beam.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.