Paul Goldberger Quotations

New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.

I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.

It fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.

Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.

The taste of people with large bank accounts tends not to be on the cutting edge.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

one of the best eyes that has existed in our time.

Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

I think the challenge of Ground Zero goes beyond anyone's individual ego, and the problem of Donald Trump is he's never gone beyond his own individual ego.

It is something akin to boarding the Concorde and then discovering at the end of your trip that you had debarked at Grand Central Terminal.

Everything he's produced is ultimately about Donald Trump, and we need a solution at Ground Zero that's going to be about New York, about America and about healing of the city -- and Trump I don't think is suited to that.

This great, glass-enclosed public space embraces a wonderful contradiction: it seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

It mixed the bulldoze-and-rebuild philosophy of urban renewal with the tentative beginnings of the historic preservation movement.

It's possible to rebuild some version of the original Twin Towers. But why would anyone want to? They were not particularly beloved buildings. They were powerful symbols.

In the first year, it looked as if we were really gonna aim for the highest thing possible. And then, gradually, sort of like the waves eating away at a sand castle, you know, they just wore away, bit by bit and it's gotten more and more ordinary.

His clarity and creativity are intimately intertwined. In his concise and brilliant way, he's able to say something that in someone else's hands is ordinary but in his becomes special and utterly clear.

Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.

I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

It seems to me that the sad event of 9/11 has created a huge opportunity for the revitalization of lower Manhattan - new world class contemporary buildings, more open space and pedestrian connections, more sustainability, more culture and the rejuvenation of New York on the world stage again.

Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

I think it's necessary to evaluate a skyscraper at multiple scales, since that's how we experience it: from right next to it on the street to from across the river, as well as at all kinds of points in between. It's important to think of it as an element in a larger skyline, but also as an element in an immediate streetscape.

By any reasonable standard, Riverside Drive would be considered the best street in New York. Where else, after all, are there such views-not of a narrow river, as there is across town, but of one of the noblest rivers in the United States.

Wright's building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.

I try to do everything from thinking about big issues like how a building fits into the larger stream of architectural history to practical issues such as how it feels to navigate your way through its interior.

On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

A suburban mall turned vertical.

The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are architecture.

A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.