Philip Johnson Quotations

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.

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

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 always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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

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

The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

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.

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.

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

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

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

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.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

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.

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

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

There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun.

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

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 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.

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

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.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

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

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.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

I get between nine and ten hours of sleep. Go to bed at 8:30 and get up at 6:00 or 6:30 if I oversleep.

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

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

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

There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.

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?

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.

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

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.

From the moment I heard about it, I thought that this was something we really should do. It's a noble purpose, and our students ought to get a chance to travel, get out of Alabama and see some of the rest of the world and the way they live.

If we start watering down the patent system... I'm worried about the future of our country. Beware of what you ask for, you might get it.

It is just blatant aggravation. I've never been treated this way before.

The sale of the painting is a disservice to artists, to art, to architecture, to the architecture profession and to the public,

Raymond started industrial design and the streamlining movement,

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.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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

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

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

The future of architecture is culture.

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

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.

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.

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

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

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.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

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.

[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.

Glibness will get your anywhere.

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

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

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.