• Connect with Facebook

Philip Johnson

  • Philip Johnson

    Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect.

    Read more on Wikipedia

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

Tags: Hate, Why, Sit
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: Great, Design, Space
Philip Johnson

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Tags: Nature, Human, Over
Philip Johnson

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Tags: Live, Beyond, Architects
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: house, architecture
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: Architecture
Philip Johnson

I`m about four skyscrapers behind.

Tags: Architecture , time
Philip Johnson

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.

Tags: Why, After
Philip Johnson

In my own work, I`d say I`m a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don`t study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that`s a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that`s a major part of the study.

Tags: Work, Life, Age
Philip Johnson

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.

Tags: Work, Life, Age
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: Work, Architecture, Age
Philip Johnson

Don`t build a glass house if you`re worried about saving money on heating.

Tags: Lesson, Lifw
Philip Johnson

I wouldn`t build a building if it wasn`t of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

Tags: Architecture, Art, Life
Philip Johnson

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?

Tags: Architecture, Art, Life
Philip Johnson

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That`s the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he`d done a good line. When he didn`t, he threw it away. I wish I`d thrown away some of mine.

Tags: Architecture, Art, Life, Good & Bad
Philip Johnson

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.

Tags: Life, Security, Care
Philip Johnson

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.

Tags: Architecture, Age, Life
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: Age, Life, Wisdom
Philip Johnson

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

Tags: Mind
Philip Johnson

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.

Tags: Faith, Path
Philip Johnson

Copyright © www.MainQuotes.com

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Pinterest