Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes
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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 demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
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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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Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.
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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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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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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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Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.
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It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.
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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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First you have to learn to do something, then you can go out and do it.
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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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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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I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.
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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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The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.
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Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.
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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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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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Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.
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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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Form as a goal always ends in formalism. For this striving is directed not towards an inside, but towards an outside. But only a living inside has a living outside.
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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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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.