Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes
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True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.
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Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.
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The unformed is not worse than the over-formed. The former is nothing; the latter is mere appearance. Real form presupposes real life.
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Nature, too, shall live its own life. We must beware not to disrupt it with the color of our houses and interior fittings. yet we should not attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity.
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The office building is a building for work, organization, lucidity and economy. Light, spacious working rooms, clearly arranged, undivided, only organized according to the pattern of the firm.
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You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.
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A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
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We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.
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What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
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You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.
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The building art is man's spatial dialogue with his environment and demonstrates how he asserts himself therein and how he masters it.
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I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that.
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We have to know that life cannot be changed by us. It will be changed. But not by us. We can only guide the things that can cause physical change.
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After my time in Holland, an inner battle ensued in which I tried to free myself from the influence of Schinkelesque classicism.
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God is in the details.
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The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.
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Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.
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Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. He will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time. An architect of ability should be able to tell a client what he wants. Most of the time a client never knows what he wants.
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We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process. Precisely, this shows whether the form was discovered by starting from life, or for its own sake. That is why I consider the creative process so essential. Life for us is the decisive factor.
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Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.
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Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.
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It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.
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In 1912, when I was working in The Hague, I first saw a drawing by Louis Sullivan of one of his buildings. It interested me.
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I see in industrialization the central problem of building in our time. If we succeed in carrying out this industrialization, the social, economic, technical, and also artistic problems will be readily solved.