Here we have the best Architecture Quotes from famous authors such as Emilio Ambasz, Rem Koolhaas, Dan Brown, Anne Fortier, Moshe Safdie. Find the perfect quotation from our collection.
Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture – great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don’t see.
Ever since childhood, I’ve been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I’m sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.
I’ve always been interested in art, architecture, color.
We need a new health care architecture that will reduce costs, improve outcomes, and protect vulnerable persons.
Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.
After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.
The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.
One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.
Personally, one of the greatest sources of inspiration for my work has been architecture. I’ve had the chance to see so many exquisite structures, whether they are historical monuments or modern commercial premises.
A Trump presidency – neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration – would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.
As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we’re making is something that intrigues me very much.
Both Republicans and Democrats championed a structure that allowed the ‘application layer‘ of Internet architecture to be free from government intervention, apart from occasional Federal Trade Commission activity.
I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It’s a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.
Some people think architecture is about the genius sketch; I don’t. Great architecture is a collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time.
The ultimate goal of the architect…is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture… should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.
Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.
The architecture scene in China is the most open and free climate compared to many other places. You can find many opportunities.
Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part.
People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.
Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, ‘Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?’ Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.
Architecture is invention.
I’ve always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic – you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.
I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I’ve always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.
I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don’t have to understand it. You may not like it. That’s OK.
Charleston has something for everyone, rain or shine. Its architecture is unparalleled. Carriage rides are great for seeing the city and hearing the history behind certain houses and the area.
Princeton University’s campus environment presents unique challenges and opportunities for architecture to act as a social condenser.
Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you’ll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?
Chicago is a city built on architecture, and there are plenty of buildings to scale.
The impact of the creative industries, of design and architecture in particular, are of course economic and they are a great export opportunity.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Architecture doesn’t come from theory. You don’t think your way through a building.
The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn’t really have movements in the same way. Instead it’s made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.
I don’t think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.
Underwater, I experience space with my body. I’ll see a school of fish gathering and moving together and I’ll exclaim, ‘This is architecture.’
I think architecture, to be really intense and fulfilling, doesn’t have to be large.
What’s fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it’s crap-looking – apart from the White House, which is beautiful.
To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.
If you’re inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you’re doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you’re just not looking hard enough.
The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.
I got a degree in architecture for the educational experience but in terms of career, everything is cinema.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
I don’t really get into architecture in the hotel room. But maybe a little Feng Shui here and there.
I grew up in Romania studying art and architecture.
In Dublin, we open The Dock, our new multidisciplinary innovation R&D and incubation hub where all elements of our innovation architecture come to life. The Dock is a launch pad for our more than 200 researchers to innovate with clients and acquisition partners with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry’s very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.
I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere – the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.
Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.
I need quite a lot going on, so a perfect holiday for me is one in a cooler climate with wonderful scenery, animals or great architecture.
What people want, above all, is order.
I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.
The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.
Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.
Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings… based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.
If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it’s fine with me. I’m interested in good architecture as anybody else.
Every market we go to, we have a domain-specific language. Every domain-specific language, underneath, has an architecture.
You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they’d become architects. I’ve had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that’s normal.
Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it’s still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.
You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.
I’d like to do a lot of things – whether in design or architecture or business.
I don’t build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.
Aesthetically, London is just beautiful; it’s a gorgeous city. The architecture, monuments, the parks, the small streets – it’s an incredible place to be.
There will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons.
I am but an architectural composer.
I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun.
I don’t see any difference between architecture and engineering. It’s the same profession.
The ‘Scowcroft Model’ recognizes – and embraces – the unique but necessarily modest place the National Security Council and the national security adviser occupy in the American national security architecture.
Architecture is always political.
Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi Museum is proof that Rome and contemporary architecture are no longer a paradox. The building is characteristic Hadid – with curving lines and organic shapes – and the permanent collection already boasts works by Francesco Clemente, William Kentridge, and Gerhard Richter.
India and Egypt have been strongly influencing each other’s culture, arts and architecture since ancient times.
As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It’s a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.
Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?
Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.
Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.
Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.
I graduated from university with a degree in architecture and then ended up doing a series of internships with different firms. And once I was in an office environment, I realized that at school what I was doing was 98 percent creative, 2 percent makework, but in the real world, it was the other way around.
I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
Liquid architecture. It’s like jazz – you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it’s a way of – for me, it’s a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.
Though I love the arts with all my heart – paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music – and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.
Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.
The Green Climate Fund is very much a strategic building block in the architecture for financing sustainable development.
Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.
What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?
My assumption was that all indigenous architecture would be more fractal. My reasoning was that all indigenous architecture tends to be organized from the bottom up. As it turns out, though, my reasoning was wrong.
In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.
The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.
An important work of architecture will create polemics.
Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.
Oscar Niemeyer really inspired me. He’s from South America, where nature has meaning. And his architecture was not expensive or high tech but artistic and spiritual. I like that.
On inspection, Gaudi’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all.
The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.
In 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, Western countries took it as an isolated incident, but probably this was the start of the push against our underlying international security architecture. And this push then started a landslide which in 2014 resulted in Crimean occupation.
Architecture is a technology. And it’s involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture – including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology.
There’s nothing Dutch about my architecture.
Architecture is my work, and I’ve spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That’s the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.
I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I’d done theatricals in college, but I’d done them because it was fun.
In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.
When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture.
My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.
The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.
Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It’s very tough.
I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that’s what I studied in college. That’s what I always wanted to do.
I studied Russian history at school, and I absolutely loved St Petersburg. It was magnificent – the architecture is incredible and has quite a significant Dutch influence.
Today’s developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.
If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect’s task – his most difficult task – is always that of selecting.
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don’t do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.
I started off in journalism 16 years ago in Stockholm, and I wrote for a few different publications for many years. I’ve also worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director, but I changed it for architecture at 25 years old.
What if we treat the high-rise like a mountain, or we have gardens in the sky, or waterfalls? I think that’s the most challenging thing I want to try in my architecture.
‘Station to Station’ came out of a sense of urgency – a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.
London, from the architecture to the culture to the fashion to the accents, feels like it’s a special place.
Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus – the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.
Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
I wanted a real profession. And I’d always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what’s kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don’t.
I love walking along Leith’s waterfront and wandering around some of New Town’s beautiful streets and squares, with their gorgeous Georgian architecture.
In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.
Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It’s like a skin or a skull, but you don’t know what’s inside.
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.
Architecture is definitely a political act.
Architecture is undistinguished, sometimes derelict, but occasionally, as in ‘Post and Beam,’ there is something arresting in a setting… the building behind the Cathedral.
The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.
I think architecture has to be a gift.
It was my interest in happiness that led me to the subject of habits, and of course, the study of habits is really the study of happiness. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness.
The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That’s where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you’re more a curator, but that’s important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
Architecture is invention.
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.
Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.
The World’s Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there’s a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn’t meant to last.
When I work on sculpture, I don’t have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.
I got addicted to the hands-on problem-solving through the process of making or designing something. Architecture school was really influential and amazing.
But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.
In the 1950s, my family first lived in West Los Angeles. Dad was studying architecture at USC and we didn’t have a lot of money. He’d buy crumbling fixer-uppers, make repairs and sell them for a small profit. Then we’d move on. My early childhood image of him is standing on a ladder and sanding the front door.
Considering my specialization in architecture, I’m not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor‘s ‘Batman: Death by Design.’
We are always looking ahead to anticipate what next, and our unique innovation architecture enables us to take an innovation-led approach to help our clients invent the future.
Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.
I love architecture almost as much as I love my musicals.
There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn’t hold up.
I suppose I’m trying to build an architecture that’s as timeless as possible, although we’re all creatures of our age.
I like the architecture of lingerie.
I’m not an interior decorator; I’m a designer, and that includes the architecture. The package must be strong and controlled, the rooms aligned, and the windows positioned to make sense with the furniture. Fluff it up, and you’ve got big trouble.
I don’t know any architects that I respect who don’t have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.
I am a failed architect, if I’m honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I’ve got really bad spatial awareness.
One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.
It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.
We have to base architecture on the environment.
At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.
If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
I practised as an architect for 10 years. I qualified in 1973 with a fellowship diploma of architecture. World Series Cricket gave me the freedom to go out and pursue architecture.
Architecture adds dimensions to my life that would be impossible to acquire if I retired. The beautiful thing about architecture is that every project is brand new. I am forced to renew myself with every project. Isn’t that wonderful?
But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God it’s fantastic.
Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.
After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.
In the ’60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.
I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.
The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.
To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.
The thing about Chicago is that it really isn’t like any other place. The architecture and the layout of the city are the best. I’m from the Midwest, and consider myself a Midwesterner. I feel most at home there. I love California. I have great friends in California. I just have always considered Illinois to be home.
My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we – architects – can effect the quality of life of the people.
Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.
The building’s identity resided in the ornament.
It is good to learn from the ancients. I’m a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.
Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts – understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that’s changing the whole story.
There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.
I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It’s more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.
We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.
I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Architecture, by definition, is always standing still.
Our overriding goal in restructuring our financial architecture should be that taxpayers never again have to save a failing financial institution.
I have an architecture degree; that’s what my college degree is in. And that sucked. I started doing Web and CD-ROM development really early on, and then that grew into being an art director and doing advertising work.
I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it’s different – even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.
Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It’s undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.
Chicago’s one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.
I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.
The thing is that when you are a director, you need to be involved in a lot of different fields. You must be a psychologist, an architecture expert; you must be a choreographer.
I would hope that the Government would still support those small, struggling independent theatre companies and also maybe look to the built architecture of the theaters because we can’t let them get into disrepair. They are part of the fabric of the country.
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
One summer, when I was on break from architecture school in Tijuana, my aunt gave me a summer job cleaning up and peeling garlic, and I got to see her in her element. She was so passionate and such a good teacher, I decided to quit architecture school and go to culinary school in Los Angeles.
After I finished school, I went to JJ College of Architecture and then to Harvard. I did my B.A. with a major in filmmaking.
The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.
One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they’ve created these amazing churches.
The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.
Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man.
When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.
We all love musical architecture; there’s no doubt about that.
Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it’s them I’m designing for.
I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.
Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.
Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go… it’s just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available.
By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards – new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic – symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture – became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.
In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.
If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
When I visit any cathedral, it reminds me of being with my grandparents. They weren’t particularly religious, but my grandfather was obsessed with architecture.
My architecture is very much place-related.
I studied fine arts and architecture, but I decided to move into movie design because I grew up in a small town in the Marche region and spent a lot of time after school in the movie theater.
People are moving into modes of participation and self-generation, which apply to everything from museums and television to architecture.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into – after all, you haven’t any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You’d be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line – how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
I’m involved in everything from highly progressive lighting systems to airline interiors. In the field of transportation I can go from the micro to the macro: architecture, transportation, industrial product design, right across the board. It’s Russian dollism, because they all interrelate: one goes into the other.
People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Information and inspiration are everywhere… history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.
The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art – sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts – as inseparable components of a new architecture.
I don’t separate architecture, design, or culture. What’s more important is a language of creativity that carries meaning.
Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It’s just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built.
I’m a member of the National Trust. I absolutely love architecture, history, geography, the arts and culture. Oh, and I love gardens. I moved from London to Hertfordshire, so I could get a garden.
Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.
A film carries six fine arts – it consists of architecture, painting, music, writing or literature, photography and performance. It’s a conjecture of all these things and yet based on literature.
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.
I’ve never left China. My family’s been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I’m a western architect.
I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
Clothing has been called intimate architecture. We want to go beyond that.
I’ve always been interested in an architecture of resistance – architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you’re offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: ‘Do I want to be a part of this?’
Chicago is known for good steaks, expensive stores and beautiful architecture. Unfortunately, the Windy City also enjoys a reputation for corrupt politics, violent crime, and some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere in the country.
If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
I see music as fluid architecture.
Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future.
Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend… they can all go drifting by unseen if you’re not careful.
Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.
I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material – more of an environment, not a product.
Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.
I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.
Yes, my children are fascinated by design of technology and computers. And I am very happy with that. Today design is a wide world; it doesn’t have to be interiors or architecture. It could be anything.
To me it was fascinating, the idea of going to university and studying a subject – architecture – that I had already faced in building some small houses.
But after the time there I’d had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn’t last very long.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money on stuff when you have amazing architecture.
I am involved in the architecture of space.
When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt.
I love antique architecture, so if I have any indulgences, I have owned and renovated and reconstructed a lot of old houses.
Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.
I think about architecture all the time. That’s the problem. But I’ve always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence.
When I’m in London, Claridge’s is a great favourite. I’m a big fan of art deco architecture and the rooms are extraordinary.
In L.A., cinema and television might be seen as more interesting places for architecture than ever before.
The audiences are really great. I really love it over there. I love Europe, period. Oh my God, all the architecture and all the history and just to the way people think and live is so different.
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.
I would like to attend college in the future when I have time. I have always been interested in architecture, so perhaps I would pursue a degree in that or business.
I loved medieval architecture when I was very small; I don’t know why.
I had it drummed into me from an early age that personalizing everything was not a good thing. Besides, I don’t think that kind of commodity-driven system makes for the most productive architecture.
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of ‘the use.’ Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty.
There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
I see only one requirement you have to have to be a director or any kind of artist: rhythm. Rhythm, for me, is everything. Without rhythm, there’s no music. Without rhythm, there’s no cinema. Without rhythm, there’s no architecture.
Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.
I want to explore my design philosophy in different mediums, and I’m very interested in architecture.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.
The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.
I’m very interested in architecture.
When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.
The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects’ personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.
There is a profound ethic to architecture which is different from the other arts.
It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
