We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the nature of creation and individual contribution in life.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe's quote emphasizes the importance of collaboration and learning from others in achieving greatness. He suggests that if everyone were required to have achieved everything independently, we would all end up lacking accomplishments because progress often relies on shared knowledge and collective effort.
In practice
This quote can inspire discussions at a team meeting about the value of collaboration.
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.
To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.
The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.
In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.
I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
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