“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.”

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

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.

Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There’s no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.

That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible… ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure

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.