A Quote by Helmut Jahn

I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away. — © Helmut Jahn
I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away.
Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. Everything else is not architecture, but a criminal act which has taken on form.
You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!
Now, of course, architecture is a blind spot of our life in America today. How many millions of students go to the university to be educated? They come away conditioned, not enlightened, and they know nothing of architecture, although they have a department somewhere around -- probably in the basement.
When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic.
It's very important that people realize: the air is being taken away, the oceans are being taken away, the room is being taken away, but we're so worried about gas prices that we don't even see this stuff.
Why strive to be 'elite'? Because it infuses your life with purpose and meaning that does not depend on anyone or anything that can ever be taken away from you.
I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.
Of course it's very, very important for me to feel Kenya, to feel, every day, this is where images come from. So to be taken away from that by political pressure or other means - one is taken away from the area, which is the basis of inspiration - is difficult.
A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.
The stillness of God is perfect. Nothing has to be added to it. Nothing can be taken away.
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.
So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.
Where can you find purpose? Like success and happiness, our purpose exists in the present, and we constantly strive toward the future to maintain it. What it is for which we strive is up to each of us. The important thing is that we strive toward something.
Once your health is taken away, you have nothing.
The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.
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