Author

The role of the architect as artist is an ancient one, but it was de-emphasized with the rise of modernism, which rejected the drawing-based Beaux-Arts tradition in favor of a more technocratic approach.

From Martin Filler

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

From Martin Filler

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.

From Martin Filler

Always beware an unsigned architectural design.

From Martin Filler

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.

From Martin Filler

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.

From Martin Filler

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

From Martin Filler

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

From Martin Filler

Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.

From Martin Filler

As with many other folk beliefs, 'feng-shui' undoubtedly incorporates some scientifically correct observation or received wisdom based on direct experience of natural phenomena; but it needs to be dealt with skeptically as a credible system of thought. Some feng-shui prescriptions can certainly lead to desirable results.

From Martin Filler

Martin Filler

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Frank Gehry

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Thom Mayne

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Authors with Opposing Views

Kym Whitley

Walter Gropius

Alain Robert

Annie Dillard

Arne Jacobsen