“In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city’s aniquated support systems, circulation”

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.

And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.

Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.

It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance

The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.

The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.

Some of the best auditions I’ve ever had have been when my agent called and said, ‘They want you 20 minutes ago, in an office in Century City, to see you for something.’

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the most important of our industries. The cities are but the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the farmer.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.

Three thousand jurisdictions across the U.S. are estimated to have had gang activity in 2001. In 2002, 32% of cities with a population of 25 to 50 thousand reported a gang-related homicide.

I won the city scoring championship as a senior.

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.

Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.