Quotes About Architecture

I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.

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.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.

It was very definitely architectural. I was using the words on the page as some kind of equivalent of a physical model. But I never thought at that point that I wanted to move toward architecture. I wanted to move toward real space. Sure, that's probably another way of saying, I want to move toward architecture. But I didn't define real space in terms of architecture, then.

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?

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.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

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.

What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it's not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar.

Allow the information to tell you how it wants to be displayed. As architecture is ‘frozen music’, information architecture is ‘frozen conversation’. Any good conversation is based on understanding.

Rather than asking architecture to be more interdisciplinary - a perennial issue within the discipline - I am suggesting that other disciplines might exploit the powers of architecture and urbanism. When addressing urgent situations, whether it's the depletion of the rainforest or abuse of labor, well-meaning people are working with tools, like standards, that seem like very blunt instruments. I am suggesting that spatial variables that are underexploited in governance might add to that repertoire.

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.

I'm not against architecture per se, I'm just against bad architecture.

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.

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.

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.

The whole idea of action being a carrier of information is something that comes directly from theater. That's, in some ways, the one thing I've been trying to contribute. I still write things outside of architecture - not really fiction, but not nonfiction. I like dialogue as a form, because the text is only the trace of an action. The consequential information is carried in the action you choose to put on that text.

He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.

It is very difficult to build contemporary architecture in Italy

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city

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

Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

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.

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

Architecture is crystallized music.

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.

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

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

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

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

Architecture is much more than a profession; It's a discipline.

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

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

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

I cannot pursue my architecture without considering the minimization of energy consumption, simple and direct technologies, a respect for site, climate, place and culture. Together, these disciplines represent for me a fantastic platform for experimentation and expression. Of particular importance is the junction of the rational and the poetic resulting hopefully in works that resonate and belong to where they reside.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

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

Architecture is definitely a political act.

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.