Quotes from Philip Johnson

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

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.

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

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

I'm about four skyscrapers behind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

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

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

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.

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.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

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.

Dullness is the enemy.

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

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