Skyscraper Quotes

I’m very optimistic about the future. I’m just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future.

[My mother] worked in the Seagram’s Building; it’s kind of an iconic ’60s skyscraper on a floor so high that your ears popped. And all the women – the whole thing was so very Mad Men, very glamorous.

Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts.

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.

There’s the downtown area of Tupelo. Did you see the skyscrapers? Two stories.

New York means so much to people. If you’re inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it’s been that way since the first skyscraper.

If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them.

Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

One argument against open systems is that they become open to everything, good and bad. Like a Richard Meier skyscraper, the anal retentive, Bauhaus elegance of the Mac does prevent the loose ends and confusion of a less sterile environment. But it also prevents fertility. Apple’s development must come from within.

[New York] is a city largely based on great skyscrapers, and they will always be the essence of New York. That won’t change, just as the character of the people who live here will not be altered by this tragedy.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. … Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

To me, you can’t have style without being inspired. When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly’s wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper.

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. Its also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.

I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.

Don’t you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn’t going to change the truth. Any more than it’s going to topple a skyscraper. There’s truth, and there’s belief. Don’t call a mule a stallion.

No security guard can stop a refrigerator falling off a skyscraper.

I’d get demolitions experts to rig mother to implode like a skyscraper.

Skies are crying, I am watching, Catching teardrops in my hands. Only silence, as it’s ending, Like we never had a chance. Do you have to make me feel Like there’s nothing left of me?

The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It’s called the moon illusion.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane’s exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?

A skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breath-taking. Not merely its height but its mass and proportions are the result of an emotion, as well as of calculation.

In a VR setting, you tilt your head up, and you really have the vertigo and the sense that it goes up to infinity, and it’s like you’re in New York City or Dubai, and you’re looking up at a giant skyscraper. You have a sense of awe.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog – I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

This (America) is a land of rich diversity, from the towering skyscrapers of Manhatan all the way to the towering mounds of garbage piled up next to the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It’s geometrically perfect. It’s tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard – or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

As the smoke clears, I awaken, And untangle you from me. Would it make you feel better To watch me, while I bleed? All my windows still are broken, But I’m standing on my feet.

I’m still walking around New York like a tourist staring up at all the skyscrapers. I wave at people, I shake hands, I help ladies with strollers.

As a kid growing up in a small town in Washington State, my only exposure to New York City was through movies. The town with its towering skyscrapers, fascinating people and teeming energy absolutely captivated me.

It’s certainly strange to do sketch comedy with cue cards at midnight in a skyscraper as opposed to in a basement with your friends.

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

Never forget, Americans, that yours is a spiritual country. Yes, I know you’re a practical people. Like others, I’ve marveled at your factories, your skyscrapers, and your arsenals. But underlying everything else is the fact that America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshipping people.

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.

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain and gaining new and wider views.

Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page.

…Skyscraper National Park

And when God steps in, His working is like the difference between a skyscraper and a star.

We’ve seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants – farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe.

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we’ll know.

The skyscraper – any building over seven stories really – will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn’t work well in an energy-starved economy.

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

I love pre-code movies. Some of my favorites are movies with Warren William and there is an MGM film called “Skyscraper Souls” which is the best Warner Brothers movie that MGM ever made.

Hitler wanted to hear all about the American skyscrapers … but failed utterly to draw logical conclusions from the information. …. He was passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. … He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

Despite my love affair with skyscraper heels, luckily for my feet I rarely wear them – preferring, instead, the comfort and child-handling practicalities of a pair of trainers.

In ‘Swimming Pool,’ all the colors are very warm, sunny, the pool and all that. In ‘Love Crime,’ everything is so cold, and it’s all inside skyscrapers.

A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay.

I’m amazed every time I come back to Vancouver at how much it’s changed. You go away for a month and there’s three more skyscrapers.

I mean, I know thousands of people died and everything, but if it happened today, there’s just no excuse. They’d be much safer inside a movie theater watching one of my movies instead of burning alive in a collapsing skyscraper.

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!

We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men’s visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.

Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that’s more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.

If I gave up writing, I’d have to find an equally obsessive way to fill my time. Yarn-bombing skyscrapers or making houses out of empty soda bottles.

It is sound statesmanship to add two battleships every time our neighbour adds one and two stories to our skyscrapers every time he piles a new one on top of his to threaten our light. There is no limit to this soundness but the sky.

I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.

With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.

Taking time to live is taking time to appreciate simple silence as better than any kind of talk, or watching a flower, or watching a guy wash the windows on a skyscraper and wondering what he is thinking.

When the film was presented in New York, the distributor reproduced the fountain scene on a billboard as high as a skyscraper. My name was in the middle in huge letters, Fellini’s was at the bottom, very tiny. Now the name of Fellini has become very great, mine very little.

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.

Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.

American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.

Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

The accent today is on results, not on how well you work. You can’t build a skyscraper in a day, but you can build a shack.