Quotes About Architecture

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.

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.

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.

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.

Architecture is supposed to complete nature. Great architecture makes nature more beautiful-it gives it power.

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.

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.

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'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.

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.

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

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

An architect is a person who builds homes or structures, stadiums even. A Supreme Architect is someone who actually built the universe. So, if I say I am the Supreme Architecture, I'm letting Allah speak. I'm becoming a vehicle.

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.

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

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

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 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

The room is the beginning of architecture.

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.

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.

Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.

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

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.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last

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.

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

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.

There is a Greco-Buddhist school of architecture and sculpture that you find everywhere in the world. It's fascinating, because Alexander died in 323 B.C. and Buddha existed around 500 B.C. But Alexander met Buddhist-type sages. And they had a different view of the world, as you know. They saw it in circular terms. They didn't need to conquer any land. And there are blond people who live in that region who are said to be descended from the soldiers who stayed. He left garrisons all over the world as he went.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

I don't know why I've always been so captivated by architecture.

My dad is a carpenter, a joiner, and I used to watch him make things. So I always imagined that I'd do something where I made things, too. I was really more interested in architecture growing up because I would work with my dad on houses.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

I like the architecture of lingerie.

We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.