Paul Goldberger Quotes

I don't want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.

New York is vertical - all skyscrapers.

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.

I needed to understand the spirit of a tall building, what makes it important, what should I try to achieve in a tall building. It became a very interesting problem, something that I like very much.

Not only did America invent the skyscraper, it invented the skyline.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.