Quotes About Architecture

I've never had a problem with the old truism about dancing to architecture. I think you can dance to architecture. There's some pretty funky architecture to dance to.

You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

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

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact.

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing - one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

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.

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

The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture

Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.

In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.

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.

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.

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

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.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

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

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

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

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.

From my first days studying architecture at the architectural association, I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation and with ideas of abstraction and explosion, where we were de-constructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production.

Open-source code is extremely well-adapted to service-oriented architecture.

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.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

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.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

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.

The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.

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

Princeton is a sublime undergraduate university. It has a good architecture school.

Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.

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

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

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.

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.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

In martial arts one of the first things that you learn is to be balanced. Balance is the central principle in architecture and design. Balance is a way of trying to talk about being at the center of things.