“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”

Waiting is a special kind of activity – if activity is the right word for it – because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.

Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.

. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.