Martin Filler Quotes

The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

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.

A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!

If you look through the history of wearables, I was named the father of wearable computing, or the world's first cyborg. But the definition of wearable computing can be kind of fuzzy itself. Thousands of years ago, in China, people would wear an abacus around their neck - that, in one sense, was a wearable computer.

It's unfortunate that a certain type of stripped-down classicism became the in-house architectural language for 20th-century fascism. Can an architectural language recover from such an association? Yes, I think it can, because in the end what you're talking about is a column and beam.

Form follows function.

'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

I almost rented a house by an architect named Schindler, but I couldn't afford it. It was a jewel.

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

To me, the fashion and architecture I like are very closely linked. Both should be clean and simple and without embellishment.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

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.

I think the biggest problem with 'industrial' architecture is that it's lost its sense of humanity. Minimalist stuff drains all the humanity out of it. That idea works great for the money thing, but it doesn't work great for the feeling thing.

I realized that the way I approached architecture was with a somewhat fashion brain. That didn't get me very good marks in school, because everyone thought fashion was lightweight. In architecture they say, "Well, why is the door pink? Where does it go? What does the pink mean? What does it symbolize? All the other doors are beige, why is that one pink?" I was like, "Well, it's pink because it's pretty."

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

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