Philip Johnson Quotes

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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

The future of architecture is culture.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

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.

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?

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

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

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

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

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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.

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

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.

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

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

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.

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

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

Glibness will get your anywhere.

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.

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.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

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.

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

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.

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

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

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