Quotes About Architecture

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart

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.

At a certain point, I got interested in set design for the theater. I was interested in architecture, but I was taking photographs at the same time, and architecture, though it had the design element, it didn't have the narrative, emotional element that I was looking to do. I ended up painting for a while. I was dancing around it, and I realized that all these different interests came together in filmmaking.

At about five I knew I was going to be an architect because my mother had studied architecture. I thought it was women's work. I had a proprietary feeling about architecture. I could own it because my mother owned it.

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

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.

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.

Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.

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.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me... the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

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.

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.

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

I fell in love with it. Walking around just feels so cinematic. I find the aris- tocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it’s different—even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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

Montreal's a unique city, very fascinating stories of architecture and history, and it's this sort of bizarre mixture of Europe and North America. It's not quite Canada and it's not quite America, and it's definitely got this very Euro feel to it. It's a very, very interesting city.

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.

My ambition has always been to reduce a building's support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life's work.

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

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

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

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.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

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.

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.

Art and architecture - all the arts - do not have to exist in isolation.

Success will only happen with Afghans leading the charge, and it is far, far more important for Kabul to create and support a purpose-driven school of architecture than to invite a high profile designer to build.

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.

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.

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.

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.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

Architecture is definitely a political act.

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

80% of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning.

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.

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

As an architect it is very important that you distinguish between different realities. There's the reality of the drawing and the reality of the building. So one could say, or at least it is the common belief that architecture has to be built; I always denied that, because ultimately it is based on an idea. I don't ever need a building to verify my idea. Of course, what with a building is more its vanity and actual physical experience. But I anticipate; I wouldn't even build it if I could not anticipate how it would be.

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.