We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
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.
Interpretation
The spaces between modern buildings are as significant as the buildings themselves.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe emphasizes the importance of the spaces that separate modern architecture, suggesting that these areas play a crucial role in the overall experience and functionality of urban environments. In contemporary architecture, the relationship between structures and their surrounding spaces can greatly influence how we perceive and interact with our surroundings.
In practice
In a speech on urban planning, one might quote Mies Van Der Rohe to highlight the significance of thoughtful design.
We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.
Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.
If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities.
What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.