Quotes About Architecture

When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.

Architecture is supposed to complete nature. Great architecture makes nature more beautiful-it gives it power.

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.

My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

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 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.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

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.

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

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

If a project has not achieved a system architecture, including its rationale, the project should not proceed to full-scale system development. Specifying the architecture as a deliverable enables its use throughout the development and maintenance process.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.

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.

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.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

An architect is a person who builds homes or structures, stadiums even. A Supreme Architect is someone who actually built the universe. So, if I say I am the Supreme Architecture, I'm letting Allah speak. I'm becoming a vehicle.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

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.

The practice of architecture not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement.

Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.

Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.

Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

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

God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is at least for me an abuse of paper.

It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.

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.

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

Our time has produced a need for contrast. This has been achieved not only in the external appearance of plastic expressions of coulor and matter, but also, and chiefly, in the tempo of life and in the techniques related to the daily, mechanical functions of life; namely standing, walking, driving, to lying and sitting - in short, every action which determines the content of architecture.

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

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

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.

I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.

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 it isn't enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. [] I like and respect Brasí­lia very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasí­lia

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

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.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

I don't know what happened to architecture [in Las-Vegas] I think they're getting us ready for space colonies or something, nobody puts a window in that you can crack.

The rest of America, with some small exceptions, has been bulldozed and rebuilt and then bulldozed and rebuilt again. Our places have become interchangeable. Here in New Orleans, everything from the architecture to the way in which people eat, the way in which they talk, the way in which they do business, the way in which they dance, the manner in which everything is set to a parade beat, they're all from here. There's no place like it.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Dealing with architecture brings me very close to the state of mind required to make pictures. One also needs an old seeing eye, appropriate reflexes which embrace sensitive observations coupled with appropriate emotional responses.

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