Quotes About Architecture

There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.

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.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

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.

What is now called "green architecture" is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

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.

An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

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.

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.

I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

I always had some kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.

Whilst acting is my career, architecture is my passion. Selecting this development as my first major construction project has been a simple decision. It will underpin not only my values for environmentally friendly architecture, but also embrace my career in entertainment

The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are 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.

Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.

An obsession that I've developed in my old age, is great architecture. I bought a house in New Orleans and I became quite enamored of the architecture there. It began there. I travel a lot or my work, so now, wherever I go, I wasn't to find the most beautiful church, the most beautiful museums. Anything ancient.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials.

Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.

I really wanted to go to architecture school but the demands of playing D-1 Collegiate soccer just take over so I tried to empathize architecture as much as I could.

It is very difficult to build contemporary architecture in Italy

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.

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.

Architecture is measured against the past, you build in the present, and try to imagine the future.

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.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

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

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they've created these amazing churches.

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.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

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.

Success will only happen with Afghans leading the charge, and it is far, far more important for Kabul to create and support a purpose-driven school of architecture than to invite a high profile designer to build.

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.

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.

Architecture cannot be understood without some knowledge of the society it serves.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

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.

There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.

I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.

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.

When I was studying interior architecture, and playing around with glass because I really liked glass. There was one night when I blew a bubble and put a pipe into this glass I had melted and blew a bubble. From that moment, I wanted to be a glassblower.

Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

... those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena - care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!

Fashion, art, and architecture are all so tightly connected; I think the way to approach referencing these art works is by capturing the essence.