Skyscraper Quotes

The building of a "Skyscraper church" would seem to be a move in the right direction.

- Anonymous

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified statue, of much more than heroic size.

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

- Mies Van de Rohe, 1886 - 1969

But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.

- Sophocles, 497 - 405 BC

A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.

- Mason Cooley

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

-Federico Garcia Lorca

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.

- Albert Einstein

Most Buildings now are glorified wallpaper.

- Alan Bird

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

- Roland Barthes, 1915 - 1980

Otis's apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiority in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e. light and air). The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further up it goes, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind.

- Rem Koolhaas

It's not the skyscraper you look at, it's the architect.

- Anonymous

Congestion is Beautiful.

- Raymond Hood

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

- Rem Koolhaas

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.

- I.M. Pei

... a building must be both background and foreground. As foreground, it must have some exceptional qualities. But it must also try very hard to knit into the fabric...

- Cesar Pelli

Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve.

- Richard Meier