Philip Johnson Quotes

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 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 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 wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

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

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 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.

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.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

Dullness is the enemy.

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?

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.

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.

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 art, nothing else.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

The future of architecture is culture.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

I’m about four skyscrapers behind.

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

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

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

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.