Quotes About Architecture

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.

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.

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.

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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."

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.

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

To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

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

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.

I just love architecture, and I just love the idea of being someone who sees the world differently and doing everything you can do in order to actualize that dream. And really sticking to your guns when everyone else is telling you that you're crazy.

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.

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

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

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

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.

I've always been interested in combining architecture with a social agenda, and I really think you can invest and be inventive with hospitals and housing.

I've never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.

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.

When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism.

Berlin is liberation. Architecture, man!

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

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.

If we continue to treat content as an extra to information architecture, to content management or to anything else, we miss a bright opportunity to influence users. Content is not a nice-to-have extra. Content is a star of the user experience show. Let’s make content shine.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Some architects think of clients only as sources of work and income but most good architecture is in fact the result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client.

Geometry is of much assistance in architecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. Difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of geometrical theories and methods.

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

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.

When I was young, I wanted to be a movie star. But I realized that you have no control being an actor. So I went to architecture school in NYC, because I was crazy about buildings. Then I began to realize that I got more excited about Vogue coming out each month than I was about my projects.

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

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture … needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.