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.
The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.
There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.
The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.
All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularlity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose, that change is the only constant.
It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.
I like to always be able to contest shots. If you play against a player like Al Jefferson - he likes to pump-fake, so you need to be alert and quick. If he pump-fakes you and you go up, when you come back you need to go right back up to contest his shot.
The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.
Plus, I very much like the feeling of height, and buildings have even more of a feeling of height than rock faces.
Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.
...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality.
