Architects From The United States

"Initially what is important is to be able to successfully make a useful object over which the maker can exclaim, with pleasure and amazement, 'I made this myself!"

"It is taken for granted that in actual design form should be used to reinforce meaning, and not to negative it."

"Concepts of size may depend in part on how well a structure can be grasped."

"...a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience."

"Any existing, functioning urban area has structure and identity, even if only in weak measure...A frequent problem is the sensitive reshaping of an already existing environment: discovering and preserving its strong images, solving its perceptual difficulties, and, above all, drawing out the structure and identity latent in the confusion."

"...different observers will all find perceptual material which is congenial to their own particular way of looking at the world. While one man may recognize a street by its brick pavement, another will remember its sweeping curve, and a third will have located the minor landmarks along its length."

"...education in seeing will be quite important as the reshaping of what is seen. Indeed, they together form a circular, or hopefully a spiral, process: visual education impelling the citizen to act upon his visual world, and this action causing him to see even more acutely. A highly developed art of urban design is linked to the creation of a critical and attentive audience. If art and audience grow together, then our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to millions of their inhabitants."

"Accumulated literary associations add depth to the experience; place names become pegs for layers of commentaries, as in the Chinese culture. But at base the emotional pleasure is a heightened sense of the flow of time."

"“An environment that facilitates recalling and learning is a way of linking the living moment to a wide span of time. Being alive is being awake in the present, secure in our ability to continue but alert to the new things that come streaming by. We feel our own rhythm, and feel also that it is part of the rhythm of the world. It is when local time, local place, and our own selves are secure that we are ready to face challenge, complexity, vast space, and the enormous future.”"

"The contemporary urban area has man-made characteristics and problems that often override the specificity of site. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the specific character of a site is now perhaps as much the result of human action and desires as of the original geological structure."

"Leisure is now possible for many , and customs of timing are more obvious and less absolute. Time has become both more valuable and also more subject to reallocation."

"An environment that cannot be changed invites its own destruction."

"We prefer a world that can be modified progressively, against a background of valued remains, a world in which one can leave a personal mark alongside the marks of history."

"Like law and custom, environment tells us how to act without requiring of us a conscious choice. In a church we are reverent and on a beach we are relaxed."

"To attempt to preserve all of the past would be life-denying."

"If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place."

"The remote past is different, since it does not threaten the present."

"There must also be some random accumulations to enable us to discover unexpected relationships. But serendipity is possible only when recollection is essentially a holding fast to what is meaningful and a release of what is not."

"...the function of a good visual environment may not be simply to facilitate routine trips, nor to support meanings and feelings already possessed. Quite as important may be its role as a guide and a stimulus for new exploration."

"Choosing a past helps us to construct a future."

"In a complex society, there are may interrelations to be mastered...If an environment has strong visible framework and highly characteristic parts, then exploration of new sectors is both easier and more inviting."

"Bureaucracy is killing the creativity in this country. All the forms you have to fill out now don't leave any room for imagination."

"Man is endowed with choice, but the world as he has made it is a perfect example of what not to do. Man's basic needs are food, shelter, clothing, and procreation. The stock market, cosmetics, religious games, war games, the myth of teaching, and political games are the lack of these."

"Architects by design investigate the play of volumes in light, explore the mysteries of movement in space, examine the measure that is scale and proportion, and above all, they search for that special quality that is the spirit of the place as no building exists alone. The practice of architecture is a collective enterprise, with many individuals of various disciplines and talents working closely together. And from the commissioning to the completion of a project, there are also the many individuals for whom architects work, whose contribution to quality is frequently as crucial as that of the architect. So I accept this prize for all who have worked with me in this unique undertaking. Let us all be attentive to new ideas, to advancing means, to dawning needs, to impetuses of change so that we may achieve, beyond architectural originality, a harmony of spirit in the service of man."

"For me the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose ... My analytical approach requires a full understanding of the three essential elements ... to arrive at an ideal balance among them."

"I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity. Freedom of expression, for me, consists in moving within a measured range that I assign to each of my undertakings. How instructive it is to remember Leonardo da Vinci's counsel that "strength is born of constraint and dies from freedom.""

"Mr. Cram’s thesis is that we do not behave like human beings because the great majority of us, the masses of mankind, are not human beings. We have all along assumed that the zoological classification of man is also a competent psychical classification; that all creatures having the physical attributes which put them in the category Homo sapiens also have the psychical attributes which put them in the category of human beings; and this, Mr. Cram says, is wholly unwarranted and an error of the first magnitude. Consequently we have all along been putting expectation upon the masses of Homo sapiens which they are utterly incapable of meeting. … My change of philosophical base had one curious and wholly unforeseen effect, though it followed logically enough. Since then I have found myself quite unable either to hate anybody or to lose patience with anybody. … My change of base brought me into a much more philosophical temper. … One can hate human beings, at least I could,—I hated a lot of them when that is what I thought they were,—but one can’t hate the sub-human creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly. If an animal is treacherous, you avoid him but can’t hate him, for that is the way he is. … The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox or polecat in the land."

"Grafting is, in effect, the healing of two common wounds. Commercial nurseries charge high prices for grafted stock, and the public bears the cost..."

"Books on model suberbs of the 1920s expressed great enthusiasm. The best survey is Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (New York, 1973)"

"Pit Greenhouses... greenhouse plants... need additional sources of carbon dioxide."

"No critic as yet comprehends entirely why our houses are so poorly constructed, why they look so abominable, why they cost so much for construction and for maintenance, and why they are so uncomfortable."

"The planning/architecture team of Henry Wright Sr. and Clarence S. Stein did much to influence the development of urbanism in this country. Their example would have been of greater impact if the Depression had not occurred shortly after the birth of Radburn, their foremost work. Influenced by... the Garden City movement... Wright and Stein fought valiantly—generally against municipal and corporate indifference—to make large scale planning an essential ingredient of urban expansion."

"A mixture of damp peat moss and loamy soil spread around the roots is far better than fertilizer in any form. Do not saturate the hole in which a tree is to be planted with water."

"A trailer can virtually double the loading capacity of a sturdy truck—another good reason for beefing up the power train."

"Heavy, clayey soils hold more water with less nutrient-leaching. The structural aggregates of heavy soils retain nutrients but allow water to drain around them. Light soils are extremely sensitive to excess water."

"Laid out in 1928 by the planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, Radburn was intended to showcase the concept of a garden city in America. Though only partially completed due to bankruptcy of the development corporation, Radburn has been championed as a model for building communities in green, landscaped settings. The basic components of the Radburn approach are superblocks, community parks and facilities, vehicular networks, and pedestrian paths."

"An adequately designed spillway is critical to pond management. The purpose of the spillway is to carry surplus water from the pond, away from the face of the dam. It may consist of a mechanical control, such as an exit pipe installed in the base of the dam where it will empty below the dam site."

"In the early 1920s, Stein set out on his own as an architect and was drawn into a circle of intellectuals who directed their energies toward regional planning and affordable housing. Among his associates were Benton MacKaye, who fathered the Appalachian Trail, the critic Lewis Mumford, and the architect Henry Wright. These four men studied Ebenezer Howard's English Garden Cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, seeking to adapt the concepts to America. Stein and Wright—along with real estate developer Alexander Bing and others—demonstrated these ideas at Sunnyside Gardens (1924) in Queens, New York."

"Depraved these styles are called, the one with its ever broken and twisted mouldings, the other with its rich crowded carving, and depraved we may count them, if we are of the school that thinks the purpose of architectural ornament is always to state some fact of construction. The Mexican architects and their workmen were certainly not of this school. They broke their mouldings, turned and curved them and multiplied their ornament for the pure joy it gave them to see the sparkle of the sunlight on their white walls."

"This process has suggested some workable alternatives as solutions to personal housing needs. Here they are in the form of seven axioms... 1. When building your home, pay as you go. 2. Supply your own labor. 3. Build according to your best judgement. 4. Use native materials whenever possible. 5. Design and plan your own home. 6. Use minimum but quality grade hand tools. 7. Assume responsibility for your building construction."

"In medieval Europe, monks grew vegetables, herbs, flowers, berries, and fruit trees together for mutual benefit. You should plan plant populations relative to the root level each species occupies in the soil relative to the feeding capacity of each species."

"An important feature of our barrel stove was its simplicity. We designed it so that any homesteader, even one only partially skilled in metalworking, could build the entire unit in a welder-equipped workshop. Our stove's low cost and multiuse features contributed to its modest success."

"The design of a house around a massive, central fireplace has, somehow, always felt right to this writer-builder."

"On the one hand, the great focal points and the main arteries of traffic speak of the dignity of government and the easy movement of commerce. But we need also the more intimate side of city planning, the by ways with their little shops, the occasional drinking fountain at a street corner, the glimpse of some secluded garden through a half-open gate."

"As far back as 1624... Louis Savot invented the first heat-circulating fireplace. His unit was installed in the Louvre, Paris, and became the prototype for Ben Franklin's 1742 Pennsylvania stove. The 1624 French fireplace achieved 30 to 45 percent more efficiency than do most American tract home fireplaces of today! Savot surrounded the grate of his creation with a metal chamber, which had warm air outlets above the fire opening. He also supplied the fire with air from under the floor. Thus, room drafts were reduced and combustion efficiency was further improved. Few people are aware that practically all of the technical features of Franklin's Pennsylvania stove were copied from earlier inventors."

"A truly great architecture grew up in Mexico after the time of the Conquest of Cortez. It was probably not on account of any lack desire on the part of the early Fathers that architecture was not transplanted to California in the days of the Missions. It is apparent their simple crude touches of ornament, that Padres were trying to simulate the richness of the churches of Mexico City and Puebla—they were pitifully limited, however, not only in wealth but also in the skill of the workmen had at hand."

"In 1908 the architect Ernest Flagg proposed that street facades should be limited to 100 feet and towers should be permitted to rise to an unlimited height above them so long as they occupied no more than twenty-five percent of the site, a provision that was eventually adopted by the city code. Flagg wanted to "Parisianize" New York with even cornice lines yet allow for a "diadem of towers"; his own Singer Building (1908) shows what he meant."

"In cold climates it will cost only half as much to heat a well insulated building as it will cost to heat a poorly insulated one. ... the annual fuel saving will amortize in two years the addition cost expense of the insulation!"

"The most noteworthy development of the open fireplace took place in 1796, when Englishman Count Rumford published his comprehensive essay, "Chimney Fireplaces." ...the inclined fireback ...increased fireplace efficiency by providing an area of greater radiation. For the purpose of breaking up the current of smoke in the event of chimney down draft, the back smoke shelf of Rumford's improved fireplace ended abruptly—a practice strictly adhered to by fireplace masons to this day."

"When replacement or repair is required due either to accident or deterioration by age, the materials are readily at hand, and the householder himself can do the work."