Quotes About Monumentality

in reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?

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.

Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.

My artistic decision to cast my mother's objects into bronze moves beyond the notions of memorializing her. I've been fascinated for some time with the idea of monumentality and what it means to memorialize. Both of these notions are relevant historically, artistically, and culturally.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.