A Quote by Gottfried Bohm

New buildings should fit naturally into their surroundings, both architecturally and historically, without denying or prettifying the concerns of our time

Gottfried Bohm

Quote Topics

Both Buildings Concerns Denying Fit Historically Naturally New Our Our Time Should Surroundings Time Without

Quote Author

Gottfried Bohm
German - Architect
Born: January 23, 1920

There was a time in our past when one could walk down any street and be surrounded by harmonious buildings. Such a street wasn't perfect, it wasn't necessarily even pretty, but it was alive. The old buildings smiled, while our new buildings are faceless. The old buildings sang, while the buildings of our age have no music in them.

Jonathan Hale

An aggressive building performance standard for all new buildings, and a set of performance requirements to be met by all buildings before they can be sold (when upgrades can be included in the new mortgage). These should encompass heating and cooling, lighting, and plug loads. Coupled with new efficiency standards for appliances, lights, and furnaces, this should reduce the energy consumption of new buildings by 50 percent, more or less immediately, and go on from there.

Denis Hayes

Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.

Gary Steiner

Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don't quite fit the bill. They don't march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our streets of crime.

Tawni O'Dell

No man (sic) has learned to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. Length without breadth is like a self-contained tributary having no outward flow to the ocean. Stagnant, still and stale, it lacks both life and freshness. In order to live creatively and meaningfully, our self-concern must be wedded to other concerns.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jane Jacobs

Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

We shouldn't just look at new buildings but at existing stock building because that's an even greater problem than the new buildings being built. The renovation of existing buildings and making them green is just as important as designing new green buildings.

Ken Yeang

Sometime in the not too distant future, denying gays the right to marry will be viewed as historically corrupt - as corrupt as denying slaves their freedom.

Mark McKinnon

I think that all countries of the region should join their efforts in the fight against a common threat - terrorism in general and ISIS in particular. It concerns Iran as well, it concerns Saudi Arabia (although the two countries do not get along very well, ISIS threatens both of them), it concerns Jordan, it concerns Turkey (in spite of certain problems regarding the Kurdish issue), and, in my opinion, everybody is interested in resolving the situation. Our task is to join these efforts to fight against a common enemy.

Vladimir Putin

Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that city.

Charles Roven

I'm European, and my roots are in Europe. But Boston is one of the most, in a way, European American cities. And I think I'll find a lot of similarities, historically and architecturally and tradition-wise.

Andris Nelsons

We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Creationists and Holocaust deniers are both very similar - both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of Holocaust deniers it's more recent history, but in both cases the evidence - in favour of the Holocaust and evolution - is simply overwhelming. That doesn't mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history.

Richard Dawkins

My proposal is not that we understand what the word ‘god’ means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross-and that we take our courage in both hands and allow our meaning for the word ‘god’ to be recentered around that point.