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 is my work, and Ive spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.

My high school had been a renovated old hospital, so when I first came to the UCLA campus in the spring of 1965, I was immediately impressed by the classic northern Italian architecture that was mixed with futuristic ultra-modern buildings. The classic architecture gave it the heft of old wisdom while the modernistic look inspired hope for the future.

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

What is now called "green architecture" is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

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.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

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.

I thought architecture would offer a mix of the artful and practical. It seemed cooler than some of the other options in the university. The lights were on in the architecture school when I got out of rehearsal at night. And I thought the men were handsome.

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.

Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.

I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.

I realized that the way I approached architecture was with a somewhat fashion brain. That didn't get me very good marks in school, because everyone thought fashion was lightweight. In architecture they say, "Well, why is the door pink? Where does it go? What does the pink mean? What does it symbolize? All the other doors are beige, why is that one pink?" I was like, "Well, it's pink because it's pretty."

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.

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!

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.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

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.

Forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and it is in the forests that men have grasped the first idea of architecture.

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

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.

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

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

Architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. Creative work is expressed in our time as a union of technology and humanity.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

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

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.

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.

While cities are distinguished by their architecture and physical appearance, Bell and de-Shalit make a compelling case that many major world cities--and their inhabitants--also express their own distinctive ethos or values. The Spirit of Cities takes the reader on a wide-ranging and lively personal journey.

I make no special difference between architecture and design, they are two different stages of invention.

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.

There is no piece of music that could relate to anything else but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it.

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

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.

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.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

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

Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.

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.

The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

One of my favorite vacation places is Miami, because of the people, the water and the beach - of course - and the architecture on Miami Beach is so wonderful.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.