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.
When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.
We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springsβ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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