Monumentality Quotes

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

The ancient city Aqpu, where kings who had preceded me had built, had deteriorated and turned into ruined hills. I rebuilt the city completely, decorated it and made it bigger than it was before. I then built my palace.

I am Providence, and Providence is myself - together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.

But monument themselves memorials need.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

This theme of bigness — all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

Architecture aims at Eternity.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.

I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. There are monuments all over the Parliament Buildings and I've seen what the pigeons do to them.

The New Gods really need to be larger than life. There's an operatic quality to them, and they need to be handled pretty carefully, or else you'll go too far and be almost like a caricature.

Perseverance... keeps honor bright: to have done, is to hang quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail in monumental mockery.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

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.

My artistic decision to cast my mother's objects into bronze moves beyond the notions of memorializing her. I've been fascinated for some time with the idea of monumentality and what it means to memorialize. Both of these notions are relevant historically, artistically, and culturally.

There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.

I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder.

I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

All kingdoms look small through an airplane window - little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they're rather impressive.