Martin Filler Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  Martin Filler

  Character, Style, Towers

  9 Copy quote

• The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.

  Martin Filler

  Cities, League, House

  4 Copy quote

• When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.

  Martin Filler

  Accomplishment, Survivor, Oscars

  7 Copy quote

• Winning the Pritzker assures a flood of work in one's seventies and eighties, jobs necessarily carried out by assistants as the demands of modern-day cultural stardom and the inevitable waning of physical capacities prevent many architects from attaining the transcendent final phase more easily achieved by artists in other mediums.

  Martin Filler

  Jobs, Artist, Winning

  4 Copy quote

• What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them. To have the crucial role of museum professionals usurped by self-serving tycoons in the name of economic imperative threatens not only the integrity of individual institutions but the very principle of art held in public trust.

  Martin Filler

  Trust, Art, Integrity

  4 Copy quote

• The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations. This imperative rightfully takes precedence over acquisition, interpretation, outreach, or any number of other activities now believed to be crucial to the survival of our great art repositories. Sometimes a museum gains its holdings with much strategic forethought, and at other times serendipitously, as when a long-coveted neighbor’s plot suddenly becomes available. Yet the moral responsibility remains the same.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Responsibility, Numbers

  5 Copy quote

• There can be little question that the tall building presents one of the most difficult challenges to the architect.

  Martin Filler

  Challenges, Littles, Building

  4 Copy quote

• The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

  Martin Filler

  Successful, Cities, Expansion

  4 Copy quote

• The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool - as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.

  Martin Filler

  Self, Knowing, Age

  6 Copy quote

• The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.

  Martin Filler

  Artist, Design, Temptation

  4 Copy quote

• High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.

  Martin Filler

  Survival, Variables, Taste

  4 Copy quote

• A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Perception, Narrative

  7 Copy quote

• After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

  Martin Filler

  Political, Charity, Shelter

  4 Copy quote

• Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.

  Martin Filler

  New York, Writing, Islands

  8 Copy quote

• Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

  Martin Filler

  War, Machines, World

  4 Copy quote

• During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent.

  Martin Filler

  School, Technology, Engineering

  4 Copy quote

• Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

  Martin Filler

  Cities, Doe, Purpose

  4 Copy quote

• Considering my specialization in architecture, I'm not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's 'Batman: Death by Design.'

  Martin Filler

  Design, Firsts, Architecture

  4 Copy quote

• From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

  Martin Filler

  Museums, Views, Design

  4 Copy quote

• One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

  Martin Filler

  Eye, Age, Enlightenment

  Martin Filler (2007). “Makers of Modern Architecture”, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

  Martin Filler

  Dream, Movement, Architecture

  4 Copy quote

• One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

  Martin Filler

  People, Goal, Use

  4 Copy quote

• Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums.

  Martin Filler

  Cutting, Museums, Government

  4 Copy quote

• Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.

  Martin Filler

  Practice, Lasts, Architecture

  4 Copy quote

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