Martin Filler quotes

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. (Martin Filler)
Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. View quote
Martin Filler
The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type. View quote
Martin Filler
The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations. View quote
Martin Filler
Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control. View quote
Martin Filler
Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived. View quote
Martin Filler
High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste. View quote
Martin Filler
Always beware an unsigned architectural design. View quote
Martin Filler
Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise. View quote
Martin Filler
Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it. View quote
Martin Filler
By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades. (Martin Filler)
After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity. View quote
Martin Filler
Snohetta promotes a more democratic workplace atmosphere than most other architectural offices. This may merely reflect prevalent employment practices in Scandinavia, but Snohetta places a stronger emphasis on group participation in the design process than typical high-style firms. View quote
Martin Filler
There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing. View quote
Martin Filler
All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial. View quote
Martin Filler
Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration. View quote
Martin Filler
The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s. View quote
Martin Filler
The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool - as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative. View quote
Martin Filler
Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. View quote
Martin Filler
The magnificent lobby of the Chrysler Building - faced with rare marbles, aglitter with decorative metalwork, and surmounted by a ceiling painted with a totemic image of the tower itself - leads to elevator cabs inlaid with exotic woods in fanciful patterns. The entire route from street to office is invested with ceremony, dignity, and delight. View quote
Martin Filler
The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed. (Martin Filler)
Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties. View quote
Martin Filler
Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. View quote
Martin Filler
During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent. View quote
Martin Filler
The financial benefits of prefabrication have never been as large as its advocates predicted, for although some labor costs can be reduced by machine manufacturing, on-site assembly of any building still depends to some extent on the handwork of skilled craftsmen. View quote
Martin Filler