A Quote by Martin Filler

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

Martin Filler

Quote Topics

Architecture Architects Before Building Calculations Century Concentrating Dilemma Doomed End Ever Forms Low Made Man Modern More New Our Place Possible Public Similarly Tall Technology Than Twentieth Twentieth Century Whether

Quote Author

Martin Filler
American - Critic
Born: September 17, 1948

After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

Harry Seidler

There is a connection waiting to be made between the decline in democratic participation and the explosion in new ways of communicating. We need not accept the paradox that gives us more ways than ever to speak, and leaves the public with a wider feeling than ever before that their voices are not being heard. The new technologies can strengthen our democracy, by giving us greater opportunities than ever before for better transparency and a more responsive relationship between government and electors

Robin Cook

I see climate change as one of the driving forces in the 21st century. With modern technology and globalization, we are much more connected than ever before. The world's warehouses are now container ships.

David Titley

The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

Geoffrey Nunberg

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Ada Louise Huxtable

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.

Kenneth Frampton

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Don DeLillo

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

Jerry Saltz

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

Jill Lepore

The nature of the place...whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs...generally gives hint as to its inhabitants.

John James Audubon

What does 'work' mean in this 21st, ultra-wired century, with its exploding new industries, low barriers to entry and endless possibilities? Is technology making our lives more flexible - or our days more endless?

Rachel Sklar

The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.

Lewis Thomas

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.