Quotes About Buildings

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.

What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.

Geometry is of much assistance in architecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. Difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of geometrical theories and methods.

When we started out, we were among the first. Beijing had no and Shanghai had very few large buildings. At that time, it was all about building, building, building - and then selling, selling, selling. We were working like a manufacturer. Soon, however, we realized that land was running out in Beijing and Shanghai. So we started keeping our buildings, and managing and renting them out. We became landowners. That was the second act.

I don't think things necessarily should have a meaning. If stuff has a meaning then why do [writing] about it? If you're trying to say, 'Tall buildings are great' why not just leave it at that: "Tall buildings are great."

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

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.

They say that 'home is where the heart is.' I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.

I think that the point of being an architect is to help raise the experience of everyday living, even a little. Putting a window where people would really like one. Making sure a shaving mirror in a hotel bathroom is at the right angle. Making bureaucratic buildings that are somehow cheerful.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

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

Sustainable development: Meeting present needs without compromising the stock of natural resources remaining for future generations. In terms of buildings, it implies resource efficiency, minimum energy use, flexibility and long life

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

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 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.

Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child?

Our odd idea of the classical world, the white Washington, D.C., is based on buildings that were originally brightly painted.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.

There's no doubt in my mind over the next 25 years how we drive, how we build our houses, how we fly, how we build our buildings, will all change.

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.

When I first saw China, there were no automobiles. There were no supermarkets. There were no high-rise buildings. There were no consumer goods. There were no restaurants that were at least accessible that foreigners could see. It was a Stalinist society, and a very poor Stalinist society. So the economic system has totally changed, and the private sector in the economic system is now the dominant sector. It didn't exist at all as late as 1979.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it's quite small and contained.

So many today are worshiping in the mountains, big churches, stone and frame buildings. But Jesus teaches that salvation is not in these stone structures-not in the mountains-not in the hills, but in God.

Politicians, old buildings, and prostitutes become respectable with age.

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.

Japans humid and warm summer climate, as well as frequent earthquakes resulted in lightweight timber buildings raised off the ground that are resistant to earth tremors.

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

I love Chicago. I lived there briefly for three months and kept a boat under one of those space-age buildings. It was very Jetsons.

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

My father died at 42, of a heart attack. My mother was 32 then. She never wanted to be a victim. And that really resonated as a nine-year-old child. And one of the most revealing things was, very soon after my father died - he was in real estate and he owned some modest buildings - they came to my mother, the men that worked for him, and they said, "You don't have to worry. We will run the business and we will take care of you." And my mother said, "No, you won't. You will teach me how to run the business and I will take care of it and my children."

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

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

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

Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.

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.

As a child, I really did see buildings bombed, and what makes me different from an American that's the same age as I am is that I can understand what happens when there is fighting in a way that they couldn't.

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

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.

September 11 had such a strong visual component, the most visually documented event in human history. Nothing's ever been seen by as many people as that was. Our experiences of the day, our memories of the day are just so tied up in images of buildings falling and bodies falling.

You can't out-travel sadness. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings

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

On Church: Church wasn't designed by an architect (Technically, Jesus was a carpenter.). So why do we think of churches as buildings instead of groups of people who love Jesus?

You can figure out how bad a person you are by how soon after September 11th you masturbated, like how long you waited... and for me it was between the two buildings going down... I had to do it, otherwise they'd win.

I live in Brooklyn, New York. It is a melting pot of cultures and people. I walk down the street, and there is art on the buildings and people congregating who have been neighbors for years and events and music and freedom.