Philip Johnson Quotes
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I guess I can't be a great architect. Great architects have a recognizable style. But if every building I did were the same, it would be pretty boring.
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I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.
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The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
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You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.
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Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?
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I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?
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I'm about four skyscrapers behind.
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There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
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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.
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I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.
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I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.
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I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.
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Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.
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Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going.
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Dullness is the enemy.
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There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.
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Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.
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Glibness will get your anywhere.
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There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun.
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How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.