Philip Johnson Quotes

I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

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

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

In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.

The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.

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.

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

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

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

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

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.

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.

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.

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

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

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?

Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

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

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.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

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.

The future of architecture is culture.

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

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

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

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

Glibness will get your anywhere.

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.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.

We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

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

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.

I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.

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.

You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.

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.

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.