Quotes About Architecture

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.

Architecture is supposed to complete nature. Great architecture makes nature more beautiful-it gives it power.

What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it's not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar.

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing - one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract

When I was in architecture school, rather than giving us drafting boards and t-squares and lead pencils and stuff they gave us all the same tools that places like Digital Domain and ILM used to make features films or special effects. They gave us all these digital tools like Alias and Mya and Soft Image and all these kind of high-end computers, so I came out of architecture school knowing how to use all that stuff. And I started making short films at night.

I think it modern society as a whole, but definitively in Brazil, spaces are so well divided and there are so many barriers, and so many divisions, so many lines and so many borderlines, basically telling you that you should be here but not here. This is my space and this is your space, and this is expressed very dramatically in architecture, we have a very kind of aggressive, almost medieval concept for architecture, which is basically keeping people out. So you get high walls, fences, and electric fences, and divisions like that.

If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

It is very difficult to build contemporary architecture in Italy

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.

Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.

For more than twenty years by my own work and personal initiative, I have gathered from all the old streets of Vieux Paris photographic plates, 18 x 24 format, artistic documents of the beautiful civil architecture of the 16th to the 19th century: the old hôtels, historic or curious houses, beautiful facades, beautiful doors, beautiful woodwork, door knockers, old fountains This vast artistic and documentary collection is today complete. I can truthfully say that I possess all of Vieux Paris.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

There's certain things in life that I love. One is architecture. And music, culture, food, people. New Orleans has all of that.

In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.

Forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and it is in the forests that men have grasped the first idea of architecture.

The practice of architecture not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement.

Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

Architecture is much more than a profession; It's a discipline.

There is no piece of music that could relate to anything else but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it.

Art and architecture - all the arts - do not have to exist in isolation.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.

I cannot pursue my architecture without considering the minimization of energy consumption, simple and direct technologies, a respect for site, climate, place and culture. Together, these disciplines represent for me a fantastic platform for experimentation and expression. Of particular importance is the junction of the rational and the poetic resulting hopefully in works that resonate and belong to where they reside.

Berlin is liberation. Architecture, man!

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

I am critical of the fact that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is pulling out of everything - the joint approach to the refugee issue, for example. He cannot disparage his colleagues in the EU either - that's not how we treat each other. We require solidarity: in refugee policies, just as in the financial architecture of the structural funds from which countries like Hungary have strongly profited from for years.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

when your field is architecture, you go visit the great cathedrals of the world. My field was relationships. I got married many times. I was practicing. I didn't date much; I just would get married. I thought, why waste time?

Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same token we rarely think of them.... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties--of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit--be passed in review.

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.