quotes about art, architecture and other important things

a collection of quotes that I gathered over the years through my reading.  I don't necessarily agree with all of the ideas and opinions expressed herein but those that either provoked thought or tickled were included.

philosopher Archives - studio of Glenn Williams Architect NCARB

heuristics

By | art, art theory, essayist, philosopher, poet, quotes on art and architecture, Transcendentalism, writer | No Comments

“Every artist was first an amateur.” – –   Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882] American essayist, lecturer, and poet

Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_ca1857_retouched

Ralph Waldo Emerson ca 1857

 

“The first job of the man who has a problem must be to become better acquainted with it.  The way to do this is by producing an inadequate solution to the problem – a speculation – and by criticizing this.  To understand a problem means, in effect, to understand its difficulties; and this cannot be done until we see why the more obvious solutions do not work  Even in those cases where no satisfactory answer turns up we may learn something from this procedure.” – –  William Bartley [1934-1990] American philosopher and author

W.W. Bartley, III

 

falling out of love

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“I would advise you to wait a while until your enthusiasm for your project has boiled over.  Afterwards, you may return and consider it more carefully, when your judgment is no longer swayed by fondness for your design but guided by calm reason.” Leon Battista Alberti [1404-1472] Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomized the Renaissance man

Leon Battista Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti

the utility of what is not

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“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends.  We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is upon the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends.  We pierce doors and windows to make a house; and it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends.  Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.” – – Lao Tse [believed to be a contemporary of Confucius during 5th century BC] ancient Chinese philosopher and poet

Laozi, depicted as Daode Tianzun

Laozi, depicted as Daode Tianzun

on modernism

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“What we sense to be modern in American architecture is to the American architect an expression of adverse forces, which he calls the contractor and the budget.” – – R. M. Schindler [1887-1953] Austrian born American architect

Rudolf Michael Schindler

Rudolf Michael Schindler

“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.” – – Charles, Prince of Wales [b. 1948]

Charles Philip Arthur George

Charles Philip Arthur George

“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.” – – Nancy Banks-Smith [b. 1929] British television and radio critic

Nancy Banks-Smith (declined the OBE)

Nancy Banks-Smith (declined the OBE)

“Today is a process of transition which separates itself from yesterday in order to go toward tomorrow.  He who understands, it, in this way, has the right to consider himself a modern.” – – Carl Jung [1875-1961] Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung

“The new art is a worldwide fact.  For about twenty years now the most alert young people of two successive generations – in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Rome, Madrid – have found themselves faced with the undeniable fact that they have no use for traditional art; moreover, that they detest it.  With these young people one can do one of two things: shoot them, or try to understand them.  As soon as one decides in favor of the latter it appears that they are endowed with a perfectly clear, coherent, and rational sense of art.  Far from being a whim, their way of feeling represents the inevitable and fruitful result of all previous artistic achievement.  Whimsical, arbitrary, and consequently unprofitable it would be to set oneself against the new style and obstinately remain shut up in old forms that are exhausted and the worse for wear.  In art, as in morals, what ought to be done does not depend on our personal judgment; we have to accept the imperative imposed by the time.  Obedience to the order of the day is the most hopeful choice open to the individual.  Even so he may achieve nothing; but he is much more likely to fail if he insists on composing another Wagnerian opera, another naturalistic novel.” – – José Ortega y Gasset [1883-1955] Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

José Ortega y Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset

“Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as “salon art.” . . . Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.” — Walter Gropius [1883–1969] German American architect.

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius

 

beauty is the thing

By | architect, architectural criticism, architectural theory, architecture, art criticism, art theory, artist, educator, literary criticism, philosopher, poet, quotes on art and architecture, Renaissance man, theorist, writer | No Comments

“Beauty is the only thing of any importance.” — Phillip Johnson [1906-2005] American architect advocating the the modernist then the postmodernist idiom

Philip Cortelyou Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson

“Beauty is the highest and finest kind of morality.” – – Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882] American philosopher essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century

Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_ca1857_retouched

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Beauty will result from the form and correspondence of the whole, with respect to the several parts, of the parts with regard to each other, and of these again to the whole.”  – – Andrea Palladio [1508-1580] Italian architect active in the Republic of Venice

Palladio_filtered

“Architecture, like the shaft of an axe, must beautifully and precisely symbolize its own good reasons for its necessary existence.  Insight and sincerity will tell us which reasons are good.” – – Ralph Erskine [1914-2005] Swedish architect and planner

Ralph ErskineCBRE, RFS, ARIBA

Ralph Erskine, CBRE, RFS, ARIBA

“The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.” – – Salvador Dali [1904–1989] Spanish Catalan surrealist painter

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol

“What beauty is I do not know.  No one knows it except God.” – – Albrecht Dürer [1471-1528] German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

“The root of beauty is audacity.” – –  Boris Pasternak [1890-1960] Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

“Beauty is a guidepost, a sign that we are on the right road to a more encompassing goal — happiness, wisdom, spiritual vitality.” – –  Mindy Aloff [b. 1947] American editor, journalist, essayist, and dance critic

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff

“The accepted view since Romanticism is that beauty is wholly relative and that every age and every nation has its different ideals.  This was the way in which the classical ideal of beauty was undermined.  I think this has by now been much overstated.  I do think that there is a normal biological reaction to health and harmony and beauty which transcends the different culture modifications… I haven’t gone into it and wouldn’t go out on a limb to say, ‘This must be so.’  But if you look at Indian miniatures, or Persian, or if you look – – and that is a less savory subject — at the success of pinup girls… it seems to me very unlikely that every human being could become a pinup girl.  I do not believe that there are objective criteria from an objective basis, both in perception — I don’t believe that people always saw the world differently — and in beauty.” – –  E. H. Gombrich [1909-2001] Austrian British art historian and writer

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE

“We believe that, if we ask why the world is the way it is and then ask why that answer is the way it is, at the end of this chain of explanations we shall find a few simple principles of compelling beauty.  We think this in part because our historical experience teaches us that as we look beneath the surface of things, we find more and more beauty.  Plato and the neo-Platonists taught that the beauty we see in nature is a reflection of the beauty of the ultimate, the nous.  For us, too, the beauty of present theories is an anticipation, a premonition, of the beauty of the final theory.  And in any case, we would not accept any theory as final unless it were beautiful.” – – Steven Weinberg [b. 1933] American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate  and author of Dreams of a Final Theory

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg

“I shall define beauty as a unity of all the parts founded upon a precise law and in such a way that nothing can be added, diminished, or altered but for the worse.”

“Each part of a building must correspond to all the others so as to contribute to the success and beauty of the whole.  The building cannot be beautiful in only one of its parts while the others are neglected; all must harmonise in order to appear as a single, well articulated body; not a jumble of unrelated fragments.”

“Thus beauty resides at the very top of the object that is reduced to unity and invests both the whole and its single parts.  But when the idea takes possession of an object that is already one in itself, in which the parts are already identical, then it overflows, as it were, into the whole completely.  Let us take an example.  Imagine nature conferring beauty upon things in the same way that a body becomes beautiful, through communion with a rational form of divine origin.”

“Some will argue that the beauty of a building is relative, a matter of opinion. They will say that the forms of buildings must vary according to each man’s personal taste, and that they cannot be reduced to any rule of art. It is a physical defect of the ignorant to reject what they cannot understand.”

– – all from Leon Battista Alberti [1404-1472] Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomized the Renaissance man

Leon Battista Alberti