Quotes About Architecture

Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It’s like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits.

Sustainability has become a religion in architecture - not that there's anything wrong with it - but I think it has to work both ways. Everyone thinks architecture has to be subservient to sustainability, but what if we thought in the other direction, like, what can sustainability do to make architecture more exciting?

I found myself starting architecture with a deep social, Jewish, liberal conscience, and the belief that architecture is for the people. It was a do-gooder base; I was born and raised that way. I was for blacks, whites, Italians, Poles, whatever.

Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine. It is in two part time; tears in the heart; movement of the legs, torso arms and head. The music of the era of construction; innovating. It floods the body and heart; it floods the USA and its floods the world. The jazz is more advanced than the architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle.

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

New security architecture is being laid down in the Northern Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, in which pro-Iranian governments are consolidating their grip on the territory and they're backed by Russia, to a large degree. And this has caused great grief and consternation in Saudi Arabia and amongst many of the United States' allies, Israel, the Gulf countries, Turkey, because they see this new architecture of security and Iranian influence and Russian influence as something that's very bad for them.

The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It's a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view, all architecture is sacred.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me... the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

I want to try to come away from that one directional, clear rectangular form. It's not used because it's the most beautiful form; it's just the practical thing. That's why our TVs are rectangles. Even in modern architecture, they want us to believe, "That's the nicest, most beautiful thing." I love modern architecture, but actually it's that they cannot afford amorphous shapes or ornaments.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.

I just love architecture, and I just love the idea of being someone who sees the world differently and doing everything you can do in order to actualize that dream. And really sticking to your guns when everyone else is telling you that you're crazy.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

It's not so much about form versus functionality. Rather, it's about doing both and doing them a lot and doing them well-and that's how we should be talking about architecture.

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.

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.

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

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

Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.

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

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

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?

You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.

Working with Joe [Kosinski], definitely. I loved working with Joe. For a guy who doesn't really come from the fiction world - he comes from advertising and architecture - he's extremely easy-going and very calm. He's extremely detailed, but a very generous and fun director to work with. He really encouraged me to find the fun in the part and to have fun with it.

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.

Some architects think of clients only as sources of work and income but most good architecture is in fact the result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client.

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

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

Taj Mahal was built up by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who wanted his beloved wife to be remembered by one and all, with help of architectural geniuses like Ustad Isa, Isa Mohammad Effendi and Puru of Persia. The result that came across was a fine piece of Mughal architecture, fused with Persian, Islamic, and Indian architectural styles; or is believed so by many.

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

As an architect it is very important that you distinguish between different realities. There's the reality of the drawing and the reality of the building. So one could say, or at least it is the common belief that architecture has to be built; I always denied that, because ultimately it is based on an idea. I don't ever need a building to verify my idea. Of course, what with a building is more its vanity and actual physical experience. But I anticipate; I wouldn't even build it if I could not anticipate how it would be.

Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.

Qatar does not have much history, it's a new emirate. So I couldn't draw on the history of the country; its history is really just being a desert. But I thought, the one thing I must learn about for this project is the Islamic faith. So I read about Islam and Islamic architecture, and the more I studied the more I realized where the best Islamic buildings were.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.