88 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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

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

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

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.