Ernest Flagg Quotes (1857-1947)

“One of the best ways to economize in building is to economize on ugliness. ...Nothing can be greater service in avoiding ugliness than a knowledge of the principles of design.”

“A master in art need not go into the highways and byways for affects; he knows the straight course and follows it. ...With dignity and simplicity come repose... the natural state of one at home in his surroundings and sure of his ground.”

“The most economical way of obtaining good results is to apply the great, fundamental principles of art; and depend on them for beauty, rather than upon the use of either applied ornament or more expensive materials.”

“When, in architecture, one uses a fixed unit and combinations of it, to produce harmony, the effect should be most striking and apparent... as it is in music by the measured beat and in poetry by the cadence and rhythm.”

“I have chosen the middle ages because, in spite of many diversities, they have a certain great stamp of unity, and, above all, of simplicity. The Englishman of the twelfth century had much more in common with the Frenchman and the German of his day than is the case now. They were all one in one faith, and all acknowledged one supreme spiritual head. The papal court was a common meeting place for the best intellects from all lands. There was one common language for all formal interchange of thought. There was one great system which separated all Europe into classes, and made all the members of a given class akin. A nation... had little influence on its neighbour, mingled seldom in that neighbour's quarrels.”

“Inevitably Le Corbusier's large-scale housing was associated with the more visionary aspects of his planning and deemed unacceptable to pragmatic housing reformers. That association formed a sixth barrier. On one hand, the Radiant City, like his urban visions of the 1920s, was linked to a tradition of utopian planning that thrived in America during the 1920s and early 1930s. Such projects and proposals by Raymond Hood, Richard Neutra, Kocher and Ziegler, Wallace Harrison, Hugh Ferriss, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ernest Flagg, and others enjoyed wide circulation. On the other hand, what separated the Radiant City (and Le Corbusier's projects of the 1920s) from many of its American visionary counterparts was his radical treatment of urban infrastructure and his advocacy of cooperative ownership, thus mandating not only material changes in the structure of the city but also political changes in a free-market economy that historically promoted individual property rights.”

“Few architects tried to emulate this honest and enthusiastic attempt to use the concrete itself as a decorative feature, and the more reinforced concrete frame structures became common, the more customary it was to hide the skeleton within a covering of brick... In 1905 Ernest Flagg, one of the most brilliant Beaux-Arts trained American architects of the day, had complained bitterly when a thirty per cent rise in building costs obliged him to substitute a reinforced concrete skeleton for the masonry construction of the Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis, carefully modeled on the Dome of the Invalides in Paris.”

“Ernest Flagg, the renowned twentieth-century architect, built the "new" Naval Academy in the early 1900s and infused a sense of grandeur into the Yard—physical structures befitting the training ground for the world's preeminent Navy. ...It is now recognized as Flagg's most monumental accomplishment.”

“In 1908 the architect Ernest Flagg proposed that street facades should be limited to 100 feet and towers should be permitted to rise to an unlimited height above them so long as they occupied no more than twenty-five percent of the site, a provision that was eventually adopted by the city code. Flagg wanted to "Parisianize" New York with even cornice lines yet allow for a "diadem of towers"; his own Singer Building (1908) shows what he meant.”