Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of harmonizing our built environments with nature and humanity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe's quote reflects the idea that architecture and urban planning should not only accommodate human activity but also connect with the natural world. By advocating for a 'higher unity' among nature, buildings, and human beings, he suggests that a balanced coexistence can enhance our living experience and promote overall well-being.
In practice
In a speech at an environmental conference.
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.
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.
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.
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build, Her humble nest, lies silent in the field.
For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.
That grand old poem called Winter
Either we leave our descendants an endowment of zero poverty, zero fossil-fuel use, and zero biodiversity loss, or we leave them facing a tax bill from Earth that could wipe them out.
I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' ...Nobody knows how it can be like that.
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