Quotes About Buildings

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

The reason I don’t worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I’ll take those odds every f*cking day.

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like.

It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

Interest rates are going to go up because employment is going to go up. If employment goes up, then our apartments get filled. And if employment goes up, our office buildings get filled. The reality is that increased economic activity combined with increased interest rates is basically bullish for real estate.

If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.

In reality some images or drawings have a greater impact than many buildings that are built.

I needed real help in New York and I had no friends. I looked up at those buildings, I couldn't see the sky or nothing, and I said, 'Well, there ain't no mountain high enough,' and I just started - the words just fell out of my mouth, really.

As the world's "most dynamic" cities seek to manage their own urban growth, American state and local officials have much to offer. Our mayors can share their experiences in urban design, clean energy projects, Smart Grids, codes for energy efficient buildings, transportation safety, and innovative environmental solutions.

People are not killed by earthquakes alone, but by collapsed buildings.

When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.

I think buildings should imitate ecological systems.

By employing the intelligence of natural systems we can create industry, buildings, even regional plans that see nature and commerce not as mutually exclusive but mutually coexisting.

I envision a day when every city and town has front and back yards, community gardens and growing spaces, nurtured into life by neighbors who are no longer strangers, but friends who delight in the edible rewards offered from a garden they discovered together. Imagine small strips of land between apartment buildings that have been turned into vegetable gardens, and urban orchards planted at schools and churches to grow food for our communities. The seeds of the urban farming movement already are growing within our reality.

I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You’re alive. And you stand up and see the lights and the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song in that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear… we are infinite.

Stain Boy Of all the super heroes, the strangest one by far, doesn't have a special power, or drive a fancy car. next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame. But to me he is quite special, and Stain Boy is his name. He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is to leave a nasty stain. Sometimes I know it bothers him, that he can't run or swim or fly, and because of this one ability, his dry cleaning bill is sky-high.

If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about how his own Paps, how he had beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.

When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn't stop people from going on in the same way.

First life, then spaces, then buildings - the other way around never works.

On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

I am telling you that the child will not out live the buildings. Do you understand that wheras women may touch the immortal by giving birth, men--great men-- must build monuments and seek fame?

It's an enormous amount of work: there are 28 separate buildings, and I work on the choice of the colors for everything. Outside colors, balcony colors, etc.. And all of this has to work together, in harmony.

From the early days of European migration to America, in the 17th Century, the prototype of buildings was based on English precedent, even if mostly translated into the locally available material in abundance: timber.

Qatar does not have much history, it's a new emirate. So I couldn't draw on the history of the country; its history is really just being a desert. But I thought, the one thing I must learn about for this project is the Islamic faith. So I read about Islam and Islamic architecture, and the more I studied the more I realized where the best Islamic buildings were.

Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It's time we gave this some thought.

Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality. Buildings were judged more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.

I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge.

I'm not digging tunnels, I'm not building buildings. My work is not hard, my work is refreshing, my work is pleasant. The more the better. Lying around and getting no job is debilitating.

Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.

. . . a jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce - like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.

They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography!

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.

Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.

The religions are the buildings or the institutions, the groups, but inside of that is what moves, is what's alive, is the beating heart of spirituality, and really, the heart's blood is the mystical experience. Not airy fairy vague mystical experience, but transformative, intimate experience that really touches your heart with love, and not just sex.

When we fly planes over countries, dropping bombs on the evil ones, I think we're doing something very similar to what's being done when the infidels are getting their comeuppance with planes going into buildings. So it's gotten to the point where if we are not healthy psychologically as a human society, we will not have a planet to live on. And that's what keeps me up at night, when I see so little focus on the behavioral side of these problems, and the idea that just politics, or just physical science, is going to solve this.

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It's not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York.

We are limited only by our lack of creativity. Our buildings should symbolize the exuberance of a free nation that encourages individual effort and creativity.

All of us should remember that the federal government is not some mysterious institution comprised of buildings, files and paper. The people are the government. What we create we ought to be able to control.

One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world.

What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation.