Le Corbusier Quotes

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

We saw hundreds of programs to redevelop the central city, the neighborhoods, in the past.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

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.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

The city of magnificent intentions.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

Certain parts are bad in every city, but Chicago is beautiful.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

The Huashan project is a clear example of how an urban element, key to the successful growth of the city, can at the same time improve the quality of life for its citizens, thanks to an integration of all three bridges and the creation of boulevards on the banks of the canal.

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

As mayor I don't intend to be just a voice for Portland. I intend to be a voice for urban America.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.