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.

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.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

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.

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.

After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow - shopping centers, airports - it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture.

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

All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

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.

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.

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.

You could say that my aim is ‘to recover the place’. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect. I think my architecture is some kind of frame of nature. With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.

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

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design.

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.

You don't have to become a slave in a corporate office or groupie of a celebrity architect, because all you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture.

The color and spectacle of Mexico's streets sparked my interest in community driven space and experience, a passion that I began to develop while studying architecture at Syracuse University and then at the Architectural Association School in London. Having been immersed in such a diverse array of lively environments, it would be impossible for me not to use these memories and experiences as inspiration for my work.

One might regard architecture as history arrested in stone.

The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

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.

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

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

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

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

I believe that sensory pleasure should take precedence over intellectual pleasure in art and architecture.

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

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

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.

There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

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?

Architecture is definitely a political act.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

I think that as good architecture enhances a city, a good cut enhances the definition and expression of a face.

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

Architecture never derived its force from stability of culture, but rather from the expression of those moments when that sense of stability slipped.

Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.