Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes
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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 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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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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The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.
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What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.
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If there really is no new way to be found, we are not afraid to stick with the old one that we found previously. So, I do not make every building different.
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Nothing can express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of St. Augustine - 'Beauty is the splendor of Truth.'
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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.
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It is much better to have just one idea, and if the idea is clear, then you can fight for it. That is how you can get things done.
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Let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive building methods, where there was meaning in every stroke of an axe, expression in every bite of chisel.
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Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
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[In art], less is more.
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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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I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work - and I controlled my work through my thoughts.
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Less is more.
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The building art is, in reality, always the spatial execution of spiritual decisions. It is bound to its times and manifests itself only in addressing vital tasks with the means of its times. A knowledge of the times, its tasks, and its means is the necessary precondition of work in the building art.
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Let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.
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Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates.
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We must have order, allocating to each thing its proper place and giving to each thing is due according to its nature.
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It is not possible to go forward while looking back.
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I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
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Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
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Architecture is always the will of the age conceived as space - nothing else. Until this simple truth is clearly recognized, the struggle over the foundation of a new architecture confident in its aims and powerful in its impact cannot be realized; until then, it is destined to remain a chaos of uncoordinated forces.