We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.
Interpretation
Preserving greatness requires creating new opportunities rather than clinging to the past.
This quote by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe emphasizes the idea that instead of trying to preserve existing wonderful towns as they are, one should focus on the creation of new towns that embody the same qualities. It suggests an acceptance of change and the importance of innovation and growth in ensuring the continuity of those wonderful attributes we cherish.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a community meeting focused on urban development and revitalization.
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.
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.
When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.
You have to change on the inside before change will happen on the outside.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
It is time to extend planning to a wider field, in this instance comprehending in one great project many states directly concerned with the basin of one of our greatest rivers.
Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
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