Oscar Niemeyer Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.
-
I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.
-
I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.
-
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
-
You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
-
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
-
I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.
-
If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
-
The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects' personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.
-
Architecture is a discourse; everything is a discourse. Fashion discourse is actually a micro-discourse, because it's centered around the body. It is the most rapidly developing form of discourse.
-
In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.
-
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
-
The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.
-
I am a failed architect, if I'm honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I've got really bad spatial awareness.
-
I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.
-
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
-
But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.
-
I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.
-
To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.
-
I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.
-
If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.
-
First my mother was Spanish. Then she became a Jehovahs Witness.
-
Men of prayer, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth. No other sort will fit in the scheme or do the deed. Men, great and influential in other things but small in prayer, cannot do the work Almighty God has set out for His Church to do in this, His world.
-
Architecture is invention.
