Quotes About Architecture

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.

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?

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth.... Architecture aims at Eternity.

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)

Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.

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.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

[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.

I fell in love with it. Walking around just feels so cinematic. I find the aris- tocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it’s different—even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.

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

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

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

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.

I make no special difference between architecture and design, they are two different stages of invention.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

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

Everything in the service needs to preach - architecture, lighting, songs, prayers, fellowship, the smell - it all preaches. All five senses must be engaged to experience God.

I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away.

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 nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Within the human consciousness is the unique ability to perceive the transparency between absolute, permanent relationships, contained in the insubstantial forms of a geometric order, and the transitory, changing forms of our actual world. The content of our experience results from an immaterial, abstract, geometric architecture which is composed of harmonic waves of energy, nodes of relationality, melodic forms springing forth from the eternal realm of geometric proportion.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Architecture can't force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make the meeting places useful and attractive.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

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.

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in 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.

There is a Greco-Buddhist school of architecture and sculpture that you find everywhere in the world. It's fascinating, because Alexander died in 323 B.C. and Buddha existed around 500 B.C. But Alexander met Buddhist-type sages. And they had a different view of the world, as you know. They saw it in circular terms. They didn't need to conquer any land. And there are blond people who live in that region who are said to be descended from the soldiers who stayed. He left garrisons all over the world as he went.

The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

Scientists like myself merely use their gifts to show up that which already exists, and we look small compared to the artists who create works of beauty out of themselves. If a good fairy came and offered me back my youth, asking me which gifts I would rather have, those to make visible a thing which exists but which no man has ever seen before, or the genius needed to create, in a style of architecture never imagined before, the great Town Hall in which we are dining tonight, I might be tempted to choose the latter.

a perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money… and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn’t very good at it.

I have a fairly unwieldy set of concerns that go into determining what I do in the paintings, such as the history of the decorative, patterns of cultural migration, Islamic art and design, Byzantine architecture, the annals of natural history, as well as contemporary painting. All of these things are filtered through my own sense of cultural urgency. How I proceed with the work has to do with how I respond to this instinctively chosen mass of materials. I'm weighing many things and making many decisions before I even get started on a painting.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.