Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that design and aesthetics are often dictated by financial considerations.
Richard Rogers' quote 'Form follows profit' reflects the idea that in contemporary society, the design of buildings and structures is heavily influenced by economic factors. This principle implies that the pursuit of profit can overshadow artistic expression, leading to a situation where the aesthetics of design are secondary to their financial viability. It also poses a critical view on how modern architecture and art may sacrifice creativity and innovation for the sake of financial gain.
In practice
During a lecture on modern architecture, I quoted Richard Rogers to emphasize how financial considerations shape the buildings we see today.
I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.
A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life.
My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
When I started out, nearly every architect I knew was working in public practice; that's where the radical thinking was done. But, there's always a danger of looking back as our fathers did and saying, 'Things were better then.'
Architecture is about public space held by buildings.
Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn’t notice and doesn’t need.
Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.
It is easy to be tolerant of the principles of other people if you have none of your own.
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
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