(This one has also been recorded as "Television is bubble-gum for the eyes")
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the
On God and Nature
"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature"
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you"
"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often
by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only
body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll
find it in the nature of that thing"
"Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to
nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in
building the principles which
nature has used in its domain"
<>On pepper
"Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it"
On himself
"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and
hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason
to change"
"I feel coming on a strange disease -- humility"
On art and architecture
"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our
own civilization"
"Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of
comforat, expressed in organic simplicity."
"Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun"
"Mechanization best serves mediocrity"
"No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might
build could never express or reflect more than he was.
He could record neither more nor less than he had learned
of life when the buildings were built."
"Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition.
How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human
life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a
French Chateau, a bank a Greek temple and a university a
Gothic Cathedral. All of the ism are imposition on
life itself by way of previous education."
"Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders'
spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character
to environment, married to the ground."
"A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he
is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart."
"Less is only more where more is no good"
"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true
value of any work of art"
"Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now."
"The room within is the great fact about the building"
"Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function
should be one, joined in a spiritual union"
"Every great architect is -- necessarily -- a great poet. He must be
a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age"
The architect must be a prophet . . . a prophet in the true sense of the term . . . if he
can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect"
"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board,
and a wrecking bar at the site"
"Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness,
and naked radiators an abomination"
The following quote could perhaps been woven into an introduction
to Star Trek :
"Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity"
"The space within becomes the reality of the building"
"Space is the breath of art"
"True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it
adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a
realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented"
"A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise
his clients to plant vines"
On other architects
"All I learned from Eliel
Saarinen was how to make out an expense account"
(said after he returned from a South American trip with Saarinen)"
"Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books
about it" about Le
Corbusier
"He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if
you were to wear your entrails on top of your head."
(about un-named well known architect of his day)
On government and other institutions
"Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic"
"A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it
to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor,
or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient
to enslave man to the machine and make him like it."
"Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or
mobocracy."
"Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of
better architecture."
"We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic
tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks
economically, just as we are architecturally"
"A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that
money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental;
to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity,
there is something beyond it and that is quality"
"I believe totally in a
Capitalist
System,
I only wish that someone would
try it"
