Quotes About Architecture

There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.

Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It’s like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits.

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

Architecture has joined the world of fashion, but fashion is passing and architecture is timeless.

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.

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.

I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

I always had some kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.

Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.

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.

You could say that my aim is ‘to recover the place’. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect. I think my architecture is some kind of frame of nature. With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

I really wanted to go to architecture school but the demands of playing D-1 Collegiate soccer just take over so I tried to empathize architecture as much as I could.

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.

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.

My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.

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.

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.

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

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.

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

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.

The most important thing, in order to forge one's own creative personality, is to travel, to see different environments, different cultures. I wanted to try to imagine a new kind of structure in architecture. In general, architects follow fashions. They're neoclassical, postmodern.

Architecture was pretty much the sexiest thing to be doing from 1700-1800.

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.

I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

In architecture, the demand was no longer for box-like forms, but for buildings that have something to say to the human emotions.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

It may be unfathomable in architecture, but it is very practical, or routine, for a person in theater to use action. You have the line, "Come home, son," but you can't play that line by going out and being a mother; you can't be a noun. But you can play to smother your son; you can play to grovel to your son. Again, the real information is carried in action. And, to an annoying degree, theater people talk to each other in infinitive expressions. If you don't have a vivid verb to describe what you're doing, you're probably going to be a pretty bad actress.

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.

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.

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.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

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.

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.

You don't need to spend a lot of money on stuff when you have amazing architecture.

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

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.

I'm afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don't perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I'll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I'm proud of that.

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

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

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.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.