Urban Aesthetics Quotes

I think Sydney has so much natural beauty; it's just a beautiful city.

The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Many of our buildings have large format murals that are of varying subject matter, and we've found that those are the sort of things that make people stop, digest, and absorb.

Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

Why is it forbidden in New York to acknowledge the charm and beauty of Los Angeles?

The argument that most lawmakers make about graffiti is that it's illegal because it's an eyesore, but you could easily argue that a lot of advertising is an eyesore.

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.

Paris enjoys a high reputation for the style of its public edifices, and, while there is a very great deal to condemn, compared with other capitals, I think it is entitled to a distinguished place in this particular.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

What is lacking in the cities, and most of the men, however, is charm and taste.

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity.

The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise.

Generationally, I relate to Basquiat's culture and the essence of his life story.

You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.

Spaghetti Junction is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at night.