Quotes About Buildings

If there's a group like Amish people, that want to live their own lifestyle – they don't want to live in our city – they want to live out in the country, with their own projects. We’ll put up the buildings for them, design the buildings for them, design the food production systems for them – if they want us to. But we don’t control them.

Frank Gehry designs buildings that make other architects half his age (he's 78) gasp with envy. Neotony is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance in his head.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.

If there is education, there will be everything in life. Government can make roads, hospitals and also construct school buildings. But your homes can brighten up only if your children are educated. I am confident that if we focus on education, our society will certainly develop.

Especially in urban areas, nobody cares so much [about castes], because you are forced to live in the same buildings. There is so, so little space. You can't be thinking about whether you are living in a street that has only Brahmins, or in a building that has been touched only by Muslims or Christians. You just live there, because that's the only place that you can find. So such distinctions just crumble away. There are people who maintain them, at all costs. But for the most part, it doesn't matter.

In New York City, when they develop something, they never use the old buildings. It's so wasteful. Why not use what's there?

There is much work to do to protect forests from over-timbering and oceans and lakes from over-fishing. We need to encourage and reward companies that create jobs to reduce the carbon footprints of offices and buildings and homes.

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

Sam screamed the fun scream, and there it was. Downtown lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing. and in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

Some ruins of ancient times are much more beautiful than the best buildings of modern eras!

And as you got older, the training became more developed and precise. We did plays, we had voice classes with great dialect coaches. But I was never into it on a school level; it was this kind of private little thing I did. At school I was a rugby guy. At school I was a rugby guy. I was causing trouble with my mates and skating and tagging buildings, and smoking bongs.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

Grand buildings made her feel better--maybe because being in a place so permanent made her feel more permanent.

I ran my own business when I was 19, buying condos and renovating apartment buildings.

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

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

New buildings should fit naturally into their surroundings, both architecturally and historically, without denying or prettifying the concerns of our time

I grew up in New York City where there is no night sky. Nobody has a relationship with the sky, because, particularly in the day, there was air pollution and light pollution, and you look up, and your sight line terminates on buildings. You know the sun and maybe the moon, and that's about it. So what happens is that I am exposed to the night sky as you would see it from a mountaintop, and I'm just struck by it. Suppose I grew up on a farm where I had that sky every night of my life - then you're not going to be struck by it. It's just the wallpaper of your nighttime dome.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.

Many of the projects I'm most proud of are tall buildings, especially the housing projects. In New York I have two: one in Kips Bay and one at New York University. At that time, those projects were most challenging.

I am not sure that I know enough about the pre-history of 9/11 to agree or disagree. But I did think at the time that the [George W.] Bush administration took a number of cues from the Israeli government, not only by drawing on and intensifying anti-Arab racism, but by insisting that the attack on US government and financial buildings was an attack on "democracy" and by invoking "security at all costs" to wage war without a clear focus (why the Taliban?), and by suspending both constitutional rights and the regular protocol for congressional approval for declaring war.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

All the buildings of justice will remain idle on the day when all men have high conscience!

The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.

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.

In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.

People need open space. People need to bring their children into an area where they can play without restriction." And I was told, "This is development." And I said, "That is not development, definitely not sustainable development, definitely not responsible development. People need fresh air. They can do without buildings. They can do without concrete. But they cannot do without fresh air.

. . . 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.

When the sun is covered by clouds, objects are less conspicuous, because there is little difference between the light and shade of the trees and the buildings being illuminated by the brightness of the atmosphere which surrounds the objects in such a way that the shadows are few, and these few fade away so that their outline is lost in haze.

Of everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.

We've taken bold action at home by making historic investments in renewable energy, by putting our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings, and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.

I would want to have Spider-Man's web slinging abilities. I always thought it'd be cool to swing around the city jumping off of buildings and free diving.

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.

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.

I got plenty of guesses wrong on things in the past as well. I don't want to pretend I have some great insight... But when the global financial crisis came along in 2008 it was scary times if you were in the middle of building $5 billion buildings. It wasn't perfect... I think that I am the luckiest person in Australia.

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

It's not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.

Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.

Scientists say an 8.9 earthquake here could knock down buildings, flood coastal areas... and improve the roads.

If you really love property, and buildings, lifestyles and how people live, that's a good reason for going into development.

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

You can take my factories, burn up my buildings, but give me my people and I'll build the business right back again.