Martin Filler Quotes

I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.

I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

I'm really into architecture, I'm a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I'm a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling.

Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

I have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy.

I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school.

My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city.

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

I'm very interested in architecture.

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright - and you can also see it with Mies - they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the Robie House. The roof becomes almost a new ground.

Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

And I loved Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he was the greatest man I have ever met in my life.