Art & Creativity Quote by Philip Johnson

Johnson’s jab lands because it’s aimed at his own tribe: the people paid to make space “work.” By calling architecture “the art of how to waste space,” he flips the usual moral story of design - efficiency, function, optimization - and admits the heresy that the most memorable buildings often succeed by refusing to be maximally useful. “Waste” here isn’t incompetence; it’s deliberate excess: a lobby that is too tall, a corridor that slows you down, a plaza that doesn’t “do” anything except make you feel small, calm, or awed.

The subtext is Johnson’s lifelong comfort with architecture as theater. He championed the International Style’s clean logic, then happily defected into postmodern spectacle. In that arc, “waste space” becomes a wink at architecture’s double life: it sells itself as problem-solving while trafficking in mood, status, and ceremony. A building’s most expensive square footage is often the least productive in an economic sense - and the most productive culturally.

Context matters: Johnson helped shape 20th-century American corporate modernism, where floor area is money and every inefficiency can be itemized. His line needles that accounting mindset. It also nods to the social politics of space: who gets the grand atrium, who gets the cramped back corridor. The provocation isn’t anti-architecture; it’s a reminder that humans don’t live inside spreadsheets. Great architecture “wastes” space the way great music “wastes” time: by making room for experience.