Quotes About Architecture

It was very definitely architectural. I was using the words on the page as some kind of equivalent of a physical model. But I never thought at that point that I wanted to move toward architecture. I wanted to move toward real space. Sure, that's probably another way of saying, I want to move toward architecture. But I didn't define real space in terms of architecture, then.

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?

But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God its fantastic.

Architecture is not created by individuals. The genius sketch ... is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together, and in fact, success usually has more to do with dumb determination than with genius.

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 you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

I'm not against architecture per se, I'm just against bad architecture.

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place in all this? Unfortunately we are no longer the interpreters of our culture's myths but the followers of that dubious client, the developer, who has little patience with the art of architecture, the fine detail and obscure promise, which can upset his financial activity.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.

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 involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

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.

Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

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

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.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

I learned in architecture that you have to have a real plan. You have to have a client, they have to have distribution, start-up money, and have a vision of where it's going to go. All this has to be settled before you start, or else your work is just a story.

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. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

The most important thing, in order to forge one's own creative personality, is to travel, to see different environments, different cultures. I wanted to try to imagine a new kind of structure in architecture. In general, architects follow fashions. They're neoclassical, postmodern.

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

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.

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.

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

Architecture was pretty much the sexiest thing to be doing from 1700-1800.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

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

In architecture, to do anything beyond object form is often treated as something extra-disciplinary - something outside the discipline that has nothing to do with art. So I'm making it clear that this is an artistic choice. It's not everyone's artistic choice. Some people should choose only to make object form because that's what gives them pleasure. But there are people for whom aesthetic pleasure comes from doing something else, and why would you deny that choice? It's another autonomous choice.

I think all writing about art is in some way dancing to architecture. It's all about similitude, being analogous, metaphorical, adjectival, etc.

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Architecture isn't just about creating new buildings, sometimes its about retuning what's already there.

Are not the worst examples of architecture to be found in private enterprise in cheap jerry-built homes?

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.

I don't really get into architecture in the hotel room. But maybe a little Feng Shui here and there.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Architecture was, or is, a kind of hobby, an inclination I have to fiddling around and building things. Putting up shelves or cupboards, or making tools, or designing houses ... it always has a functional or social motivation. If social changes are in the air, I am gripped immediately by the desire to build, and I think that I accelerate or anticipate changes in my life by doing so, at least in draft. In the case of my house, that was anticipation: in other words, first build, then change one's life.

We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

François Mitterrand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, "You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - you brought the new and the old together." But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.