Modern History 1 - Quotes

Antonio Sant'Elia

"We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist [apartment] house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away ...

[and they] must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass."

Antonio Sant'Elia

"...Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city."

Le Corbusier

"Engineer's Aesthetic and Architecture are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression."

Le Corbusier

"Volume and surface are the elements by which architecture manifests itself.

Volume and surface are determined by the plan. The plan is the generator."

Le Corbusier

Architecture is a well stated problem."

Le Corbusier

".. everything here is resolved in accordance with an unsurpassable formula.."

Le Corbusier

"A new term has replaced the old word furniture... The new term is equipment, which implies the logical classification of the various elements necessary to run a

house that results from their practical analysis."

Le Corbusier

"An inevitable element of Architecture. The necessity for order. The regulating line is a guarantee against willfulness. It brings satisfaction to the understanding. The regulating line is a means to an end; it is not a recipe. Its choice and the modalities of expression given to it are an integral part of architectural creation."

Kasimir Malevitch

"Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art.

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, ... it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without 'things'."

Kasimir Malevitch

"Under Suprematism ... art ...

wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without 'things'."

Walter Gropius

"The grain elevators of Canada and South America ... are almost as impressive in their monumental power as the buildings of ancient Egypt." WG, "The Development of Industrial Buildings,"

Gropius

"Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as 'salon art.'

Gropius

"After that violent interruption.. every thinking man felt the necessity for an intellectual change of front. ... It was then that the immensity of the mission of the architects of my own generation first dawned on me. I saw that architects cannot hope to realize their ideas unless they can influence the industry of his country sufficiently for a new school of design to arise as a

result..."

Gropius

"A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy."

Mies van der Rohe

Alvar Aalto