Quotes About Architecture

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.

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.

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.

If you look at the Earth without architecture, its sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether its a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.

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.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. Im not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.

I did make several trips to the very wonderful [Georgia] O'Keeffe museum. Besides the art (my favorite paintings are from her Pelvis series) my favorite thing about the museum is the architecture. I love how enormously tall the doors are - it is like going into a church. There is also something home-like about the layout of the museum. I wish I could live there!

If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform.

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

When I first got interested in comics at the time I was studying architecture and I discovered comics as a medium through listening to Art who was courting me by reading me Little Nemo and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. It was really very effective.

The architecture per se isn't at fault. The more important factor, in my view, is the political neglect of these areas, which have essentially been cut off from other neighborhoods.

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.

I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture.

I'm trying to create flesh architecture. I aim to get a sculptural feel for groups of bodies, as well as create performance art.

Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.

But I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Montreal's a unique city, very fascinating stories of architecture and history, and it's this sort of bizarre mixture of Europe and North America. It's not quite Canada and it's not quite America, and it's definitely got this very Euro feel to it. It's a very, very interesting city.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

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

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.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

It is today an accepted principle of golfing architecture that the tiger should be teased and trapped and tested, while the rabbit should be left to peace, since he can make his own hell for himself.

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 greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.

We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.

In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.

You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.

Architecture is definitely a political act.

Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I Casually met there who detained me for love of me, Day by day and night by night we were together—all else Has long been forgotten by me, I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung To me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go, I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams.

Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same token we rarely think of them.... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties--of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit--be passed in review.

Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety , and Economy.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

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

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.

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.

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless

Architecture, either practically considered or viewed as an art of taste, is a subject so important and comprehensive in itself, that volumes would be requisite to do it justice. Buildings of every description, from the humble cottage to the lofty temple, are objects of such constant recurrence in every habitable part of the globe, and are so strikingly indicative of the intelligence, character, and taste of the inhabitants, that they possess in themselves a great peculiar interest for the mind.

Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.

Life is more important than architecture.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.