Philip Johnson Quotes

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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.

I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

The future of architecture is culture.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

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.

It is wonderful to be in the country in a glass house, because no matter what happens out there, you're nice and safe, you know, cuddled in your little bed, and there it is, raging storms, snowing - wonderful.

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.

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?

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

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.

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.

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

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.

We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.

Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.

There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.

I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

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.

I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate.

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Glibness will get your anywhere.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

In my own work, I'd say I'm a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don't study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that's a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that's a major part of the study.

I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.

Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.

American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.

I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

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.

The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.

In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.

Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.