Philip Johnson Quotes

Philip Johnson presents witty observations on design and space that feel like a lively tour through bold ideas.

31 quotes

1. I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.

2. Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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

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

5. I am a whore and I am paid very well for high-rise buildings.

6. 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.

7. I believe in juxtaposition of the arts.

8. Philip Johnson on Frank Lloyd Wright - He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.

9. The Michelangelos of this world are not to be imitated; it is too difficult, and too dangerous.

10. The duty of the artist is to strain against the bonds of the existing style.

11. The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That's all.

12. I would rather stay in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away, than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms.

13. Architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organization of volumes. These are ancillary to the main point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists in time.

14. On architects being known for long life spans: Of course they live long -- they have a chance to act out all their aggressions.

15. To be in the presence of a great work of architecture is such a satisfaction that you can go hungry for days. To create a feeling such as mine in Chartres Cathedral when I was 13 is the aim of architecture.

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

17. ...Comfort is not a function of beauty... purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful...sooner or later we will fit our buildings so that they can be used...where form comes from I don't know, but it has nothing at all to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture.

18. 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.

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

20. 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.

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

22. You cannot not know history.

23. Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

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

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

26. 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.

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

28. I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

29. We do pretty much whatever we want to.

30. 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.

31. 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.