Quotes About Buildings

Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design?

Buildings for me represent opportunities of agency, transformation, and storytelling. They are not just artifacts. There is this big tradition of buildings-as-artifacts - constructed artifacts - but for me they are these incredible sites of negotiation.

I'm a New Yorker. I like the big streets and the big buildings. It's a great place to walk.

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.

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.

I have a lot of mental issues that I just am so fearful of things, which I shouldn't be, right? Scared of heights. Scared of buildings falling on me. Scared of the dark. Scared of crowds. Those are my biggest issues. I'm just scared of people. It's just - in general.

All these buildings are like mountains I would like to climb, but I am forbidden.

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.

When you've got Jews and Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus removing graffiti from buildings, or getting drug dealers off the street, that's side by side. When you do that, you take it from the very elevated level of interfaith dialogue to the street level of neighbors. You get them working side by side, and they become friends. Friendship sometimes counts for more than interfaith agreement or understanding. Friendship is deeply human.

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.

Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic, and being stretched outside of our own social makeup.

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.

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth.... Architecture aims at Eternity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you're arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took.

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.

. . . 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.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.

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.

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.

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.

All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow; acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births in death. Knowing this, one should, from the very first, renounce acquisitions and storing-up, and building, and meeting; and, faithful to the commands of an eminent Guru, set about realizing the Truth. That alone is the best of religious observances.

Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.

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

The United States have developed a new weapon that destroys people but it leaves buildings standing. It's called the stock market.

A lot of Manchester now - it's creating jobs and that's great, but some of the character is getting sucked out. There's good and bad, but our personal perspective is that it's just a shame. You in Chicago protect your buildings, we don't have that. You'll find a good building will get replaced by a horrible looking thing.

For me, I guess I'm the acting equivalent of somebody that jumps off buildings and parachutes.

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.

When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting.

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.

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.

The fact is that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families at a Bar Mitzvah in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, or slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do not do so for any reason related to poverty. They do so because they hold evil beliefs and have deformed consciences

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

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.

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.

Buildings are tools to reach people, raise disciples, reach students, train up our kids, heal marriages and families and worship God.

Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

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

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

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

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

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.