Quotes About Buildings

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

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'm afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don't perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I'll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I'm proud of that.

I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.

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

I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were doctors. He became a doctor because his mother cleaned office buildings at night, and because she loved her children. She grew bowlegged from cleaning office buildings at night, and in the process she taught him something about courage and bravery and dedication to others.

...and suddenly you started singing out your love for me. My name and everything, loud enough to reach the top floors of all the buildings. I should have told you to stop, but I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t mind if your love for me woke people up. I didn’t mind if it somehow sneaked into their sleep.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.

What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

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.

Stupid presidents, smart presidents, white presidents, black presidents - doesn't work! What this country needs is a crazy Third World dictator. And Donald Trump has what it takes to be that. He's already got a plane with his name on it, solid gold buildings, a harem...

Here in Barcelona, it's the architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic who are the objects of admiration - not a bunch of half-witted monarchs.

It is important to reflect on the kindness of others. Every aspect of our present well-being is due to others' hard work. The buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, are all provided by others. None of them would exist but for the kindness of so many people unknown to us.

Credit card companies pay college students generously to stand outside dining halls, dorms, and academic buildings and encourage their fellow students to apply for credit cards.

Because, if we understand how a building is to be produced and we find a way that it can be more simply produced, then obviously we are contributing to building better buildings more easily.

I never wanted to make portraits - to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations.... I have always been interested in everyman - average, ordinary people in everyday situations.

When somebody is flying airplanes into buildings and killing innocent people in the name of God, it makes you question why do they have that interpretation and somebody else has another interpretation, and how many people of Muslim faith would agree with that, and what are the different aspects of different people's religions that is so divisive, rather than being unifying?

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

You can see the most beautiful things from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I read somewhere that people on the street are supposed to look like ants, but that's not true. They look like little people. And the cars look like little cars. And even the buildings look little. It's like New York is a miniature replica of New York, which is nice, because you can see what it's really like, instead of how it feels when you're in the middle of it.

The great object to be attained through the observance of Arbor Day is the cultivation of a love for nature among children, with the confident expectation that thereby the needless de-struction of the forests will be stayed, and the improvement of grounds about school buildings and residences will be promoted.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.

Moms are, in my opinion, the wonders of the universe. They can leap tall buildings in a single bound, they can go where no person has gone before, and they can somehow get toddlers to eat. The problem is that mothers are also some of the most stressed people on the planet. There's just so much to do and not enough of them.

if they take half the buildings that they use to praise god and give it to the motherfuckers who need god we'd be 'aight

I always lived in old buildings, and I thought about who lived here before. You'd have to be oblivious not to.

They work now with computers for building buildings and books, but not ever with new ideas.

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've always been interested, - if you look back at my work from the beginning, really - I've always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface. We reshape the earth's surface, from architecture to paving streets, to parking lots and buildings that are really reforming the surface of the earth. Reforming nature, taking over what we find. And we're mushing it around and remaking a new earth - or, what we used to call Terra Nova.

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.

I got into architecture because I was searching for a way to produce in the world. I went to art school and thought I would do it through art, but I realized very quickly that I was interested in the social ramifications of form making. So buildings became the vehicle and fulfilled that thing. That satisfied me when I produced them. I decided this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

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.

Theatre has nothing to do with buildings or other physical constructions. Theatre - or theatricality - is the capacity, this human property which allows man to observe himself in action, in activity. Man can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking.

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.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.

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.

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.

Yes, and I also like jumping out of tall buildings.

The rich and powerful always seem to prefer the tops of buildings. Hasn't anyone ever explained to them that higher just means you have farther to fall? -- Anita Blake

We tend to rush toward the complex when trying to solve a daunting problem, but in this case, simplicity wins. Better buildings, responsible energy use and renewable energy choices are all we need to tackle both energy independence and climate change.