The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.
When I leave Somalia I will leave buildings but not people.
There are currently more political parties in Iraq than unbombed buildings to hold them.
. . . and suddenly you started singing out your love for me. My name and everything, loud enough to reach the top floors of all the buildings. I should have told you to stop, but I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t mind if your love for me woke people up. I didn’t mind if it somehow sneaked into their sleep.
[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic. . . . One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.
All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.
Buildings have been made because of man.
I did climb about 80 buildings around the world and I climbed even the five tallest.
In far Eastern Russia, there's just some towns that time has forgotten. I guess they used to maybe be industrial or something that are now there's just lots of rusty hulks of buildings and a lot of people wandering around, a lot of alcoholism and violence because people have got nothing to do and no work. Yet people were very generous.
It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform.
The United States have developed a new weapon that destroys people but it leaves buildings standing. It's called the stock market.
Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. . . . for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
I got into architecture because I was searching for a way to produce in the world. I went to art school and thought I would do it through art, but I realized very quickly that I was interested in the social ramifications of form making. So buildings became the vehicle and fulfilled that thing. That satisfied me when I produced them. I decided this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
New ideas must use old buildings
There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
The Holy Ghost does not come upon methods, but upon men. He does not anoint machinery, but men. He does not work through organizations, but through men. He does not dwell in buildings, but men. He indwells the Body of Christ, directs its activities, distributes its forces, empowers its members.
