Quotes About Urbanism

I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism. I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition; it's amazing.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

Look at London or Paris: they're both filthy. You don't get that in Tokyo. The proud residents look after their city.

I told them that the form of a building must follow its function.

The apocalyptic dystopias dreamed up by anti-urbanists were peopled by seething masses welded into the terrible organism of the mob, which is also a standard-issue subject of expressionism.

Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine—running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8

I'm interested in the gene bank of how Americans have built in different regions in different times.

It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.

I try firstly to make buildings humane.

Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.

wouldn't leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean," Mary declared. And indeed, she only left Los Angeles on urgent business. She was too tough and too fragile for anyplace else.

well come with me." "I wouldn't leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean," Mary declared. And indeed, she only left Los Angeles on urgent business. She was too tough and too fragile for anyplace else.

When you've seen New York, you've seen almost every city in North America. Everything is uniformly the same.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.