The architect ... has something in common with the landscape gardener. Everyone can grasp the fact that the gardener's success dep...ends on whether or not the plants he selects for the garden thrive there. No matter how beautiful his conception of a garden may be it will, nevertheless, be a failure if it is not the right environment for the plants, if they cannot flourish in it. The architect, too, works with living things--with human beings, who are much more incalculable than plants. If they cannot thrive in his house its apparent beauty will be of no avail--without life it becomes a monstrosity. It will be neglected, fall into disrepair and change into something quite different from what he intended. Indeed, one of the proofs of good architecture is that it is being utilized as the architect had planned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Architecture is a chained and fettered art. Far from being "frozen music," it is an art constantly attempting to realize in solid,... stable form those effects which music is able to conjure up in an instant--effects which succeed each other rapidly during the progress of a musical work. Music can attain the colossal in a way which, in architecture, only the rarest opportunities render even remotely possible. Music can, in a few moments, admit us through vast portals into avenues, courts and halls of infinite extent and variety. Music can suddenly raise up an entire structure and, by the device of modulation, lift it on to a podium, abruptly recess its facades and turn them bodily into the sunshine. Music can etch silhouettes ten times more intricate than those of Dresden or London City, repeat them, increase or reduce them, hurl them into the distance or bring them before us in precise detail. Most of the essentials of architecture--mass, rhythm, texture, outline--are within music's power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving, the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth....... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago's achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anyt...hing is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape.... What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hell is out of fashion--institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the ...gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our art is the finest, the noblest, the most suggestive, for it is the synthesis of all the arts. Sculpture, painting, literature,... elocution, architecture, and music are its natural tools. But while it needs all of those artistic manifestations in order to be its whole self, it asks of its priest or priestess one indispensable virtue: "faith."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquito...us in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »