Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Johnson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American architect Philip Johnson.

Last updated on April 19, 2025.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks. In his obituary in 2005, the "New York Times" wrote that his works "were widely considered among the architectural masterpieces of the 20th century."

American - Architect | July 8, 1906 - January 25, 2005

Source: Wikipedia

Architecture is art, nothing else.

Philip Johnson

Dullness is the enemy.

Philip Johnson

I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.

Philip Johnson

I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.

Philip Johnson

I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?

Philip Johnson

You cannot not know history.

Philip Johnson

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

Philip Johnson

I guess I can't be a great architect. Great architects have a recognizable style. But if every building I did were the same, it would be pretty boring.

Philip Johnson

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

Philip Johnson

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

Philip Johnson

Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?

Philip Johnson

I'm about four skyscrapers behind.

Philip Johnson

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.

Philip Johnson

Glibness will get your anywhere.

Philip Johnson

There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.

Philip Johnson

In my own work, I'd say I'm a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don't study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that's a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that's a major part of the study.

Philip Johnson

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

Philip Johnson

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

Philip Johnson

I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.

Philip Johnson

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

Philip Johnson

I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Philip Johnson

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

Philip Johnson

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

Philip Johnson

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

Philip Johnson

I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

Philip Johnson

I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.

Philip Johnson

It is wonderful to be in the country in a glass house, because no matter what happens out there, you're nice and safe, you know, cuddled in your little bed, and there it is, raging storms, snowing - wonderful.

Philip Johnson

Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going.

Philip Johnson

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

Philip Johnson

The future of architecture is culture.

Philip Johnson

The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

Philip Johnson

I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.

Philip Johnson

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

Philip Johnson

You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.

Philip Johnson

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

Philip Johnson

I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.

Philip Johnson

There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.

Philip Johnson

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Philip Johnson

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

Philip Johnson

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Philip Johnson

I get between nine and ten hours of sleep. Go to bed at 8:30 and get up at 6:00 or 6:30 if I oversleep.

Philip Johnson

Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.

Philip Johnson

There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun.

Philip Johnson

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

Philip Johnson

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

Philip Johnson

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

Philip Johnson

American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.

Philip Johnson

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

Philip Johnson

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

Philip Johnson

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

Philip Johnson

Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.

Philip Johnson

We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.

Philip Johnson

I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

Philip Johnson

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

Philip Johnson

Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.

Philip Johnson

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

Philip Johnson

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

Philip Johnson

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

Philip Johnson

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Philip Johnson

So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.

Philip Johnson