Quotes About Architecture

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

We have to change from 'ego-architecture' to 'eco-architecture.'

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.

Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don’t value architecture, we don’t take it seriously, we don’t want to pay for it and the architect isn’t trusted.

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.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

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.

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.

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.

Only architecture that considers human scale and interaction is successful architecture.

Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.

Vitruvius, the great writer, architect and engineer, identified in his famous treatise on Architecture that the three values essential to any work of Architecture were: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas; or firmness, utility, and delight. Firmness meaning well built, solid and resistant; utility meaning useful and functional, and delight meaning beautiful.

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

Don’t go where it is all fine music and grand talk and beautiful architecture; those things will neither fill anybody’s stomach, nor feed his soul. Go where the gospel is preached, the gospel that really feeds your soul, and go often.

Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.

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.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.

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

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

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.

Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic.

I started off in architecture, and I just couldn't fit into the vibe there. I just felt more at home in the Art Department, so I just ended up there. But I would be an architect if it didn't require so much engineering.

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.

But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.

Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

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.

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.

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

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.

The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture.

Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

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

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Within the human consciousness is the unique ability to perceive the transparency between absolute, permanent relationships, contained in the insubstantial forms of a geometric order, and the transitory, changing forms of our actual world. The content of our experience results from an immaterial, abstract, geometric architecture which is composed of harmonic waves of energy, nodes of relationality, melodic forms springing forth from the eternal realm of geometric proportion.

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

I think of architecture as a piece of clothing to wrap around human beings

All the same, the fundamental truths which govern that art are still unchangeable; just as the principles of mechanics must always govern architecture, whether the building be made of wood, stone, iron or concrete; just as the principles of harmony govern music of whatever kind. It is still necessary, then, to establish the principles of war.

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

Taj Mahal was built up by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who wanted his beloved wife to be remembered by one and all, with help of architectural geniuses like Ustad Isa, Isa Mohammad Effendi and Puru of Persia. The result that came across was a fine piece of Mughal architecture, fused with Persian, Islamic, and Indian architectural styles; or is believed so by many.

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.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

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