Quotes About Buildings

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

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.

As time went by we developed a sort of ideology without ever formulating it as such. I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking.

In China I told pastors about how, in the West, we have these church buildings and how we go to services each week that last an hour or so. I told them how if we don't like the music or the message then we can go to different buildings and services... They all broke out into laughter. They thought I was the funniest guy they had ever seen.

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.

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

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.

Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects, such as buildings, machines, and automobiles, but they also include organizations, organizational structures like extended families . . . tribes, nations, corporations, churches, political parties, governments, and so on. Some of these may grow unconsciously, but they all originate and are sustained by the images in the human mind.

The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape.

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

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great man must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor

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.

One or two of the trips were a bit scary. Soldiers had me at gun point on one trip, locked me in my van all night and escorted me in and out of buildings when I wanted to wash.

It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

How long could we do this before you started bitching?" Simon said as we turned down another street of apartment buildings. "What?" "We've been walking for two days now, and you haven't complained once. It's damned annoying, you know." I looked at him. "If you don't complain, then I can't complain. Not without sounding like a whiny little snot.

When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.

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.

Bach is how buildings got taller. It's how we got to the moon.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

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.

I grew up looking at the Sunset Strip, literally. The things that I remember are the Rainbow Room, the Roxy, the Bizarries, Tower, I grew up my whole life going there, Filthy McNasty's and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings.

We had the city trying to demolish two of our exhibition spaces, which was at first pretty disturbing. But following the freak-out is the realization that an attachment to any kind of form is pointless. Forgive me if I seem like a complete nihilist, but if the demolition trucks show up and the buildings come down, then that just presents a new setting in which an artist can work. The real challenge is trying to conceal my delight in the process.

I don't measure success by how many buildings have my name on it.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

I see water and buildings ... Oh my God! Oh my God.

I visited the compound of the American embassy and talked to the police and the people and encouraged them, and I told them to take the proper measure and apply the law against the people who are attacking them and attacking the buildings.

Ask Hillary Clinton why she takes tens of millions of dollars from countries that hate women and disrespect women, that throw gays off of buildings.

Music was literally in the air at the time, the Vienna of 1780. Everybody played music, classical music. There were in fact so many musicians that in apartment buildings people had to come up with a schedule - you practice at 5 p.m., I'll practice at 6 p.m. That way the music didn't collide with one another.

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.

There are about 46,000 jobs supported by the solar industry right now. That's fewer than it should be, too. And you have a whole other set of jobs in energy-efficiency in buildings and in creating the "Smart Grid," as we call it.

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 never realised that the Edinburgh skyline was so interesting - it's gothic and very urban and there's a lot of church spires and old brownstone buildings.

The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

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.

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

My mother died yesterday, yesterday many years ago. You know, what amazed me the most the next day after her leaving was the fact that the buildings were still in place, the streets were still full of cars running, full of people who were walking, seemingly ignoring that my whole world has just disappeared." (rough translation)

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

First, we must stop wasting energy. A quarter of the UK's carbon emissions come from the home. Our housing stock - the oldest in Europe - is costing us the earth... After transport, heating is the second biggest driver of energy demand in Britain. British Gas research suggests that householders who put in energy efficiency measures cut their gas consumption by 44%. Better insulated buildings will do much of the work for us.

If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you?

The sweet smell of the South, of Camellias and Azaleas, clings to Beaufort's ancient and historic buildings.

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

What exhibit buildings God will have! The historical exhibits, the scientific exhibits, the spiritual exhibits, to be able to see the marvelous wonders of the Spirit World!

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.

We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century.