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Quotes of the Day for 1 May 2012 – Skyscrapers
Construction started for the Home Insurance Building at the corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets in Chicago on this day in 1884. The first building to be called a skyscraper, it would soon stand an imposing ten stories tall! On this day in 1931, the somewhat taller (102 stories) Empire State Building was dedicated at Manhattan, the tallest building in the world again. Here on Whidbey we don't have such things, but driving through Seattle occasionally I see dozens and here I have a half dozen quotes related to Skyscrapers.
The quotes:
In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit - if totally different in form - from all the romantic architecture of the past.
- Dan Cruickshank
Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified statue, of much more than heroic size.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
- Roland Barthes, 1915 - 1980
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
- Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967
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.
- George Gershwin, 1898 - 1937
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1886 - 1969
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