Architecture Building Quotes

#1. In a place like the Greek Theater in L.A., to try and create a close connection with the audience seems almost antithetical to the architecture of the building.

Alex Ebert

#2. Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.

Enid Nemy

#3. Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

Steven Holl

#4. I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people.

Donna Karan

#5. Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.

Alvar Aalto

#6. 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.

Martin Filler

#7. Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#8. The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

Russell Lynes

#9. Home development is about wishful thinking. It's about capturing a dream.

Barbara Delinsky

#10. My ambition has always been to reduce a building's support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life's work.

Oscar Niemeyer

#11. Some architects have a preconceived notion of what a building should be

Curtis W. Fentress

#12. Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.

Zaha Hadid

#13. Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

Robert A. Heinlein

#14. The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

Ada Louise Huxtable

#15. I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

Renzo Piano

#16. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution.

Le Corbusier

#17. The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.

Jimenez Lai

#18. The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you're talking about building a house, you're talking about dreams.

Robert A. M. Stern

#19. I taught at Princeton for 39 years, and the school of architecture on the campus is the worst building on the campus.

Michael Graves

#20. Since I am a Japanese man who's been building through the experience of Japanese architecture, my actual designs come from Japanese architectural concepts, although they're based on Western methods and materials.

Tadao Ando

#21. My favourite piece of architecture is the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor (273 Bloor Street West). When they cleaned up the old building a few years back, the stonework just knocked me out. It is a great melding of the Old Toronto and the new.

Andy Barrie

#22. Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all.

Richard Whately

#23. Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order
that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)

Alain De Botton

#24. In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#25. It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Helmut Jahn

#26. If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

Arne Jacobsen

#27. The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

Swami Vivekananda

#28. Foundational design principles regarding aesthetics, symbolism and meaning of place were for the old-timer carpenter, simply routine.
Unfortunately, these principles began to lose their footing in the late 1800s, when building practices shifted toward more commercial technologies.

Shannon Taylor Scarlett

#29. If architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis, and we are sitting in its silhouette.

Timothy Levitch

#30. When does a building actually become a built?

Le Corbusier

#31. Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.

Zaha Hadid

#32. A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

Antoine Predock

#33. 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.

Martin Puryear

#34. Concepts differentiate architecture from mere building ... A bicycle shed with a concept is architecture; a cathedral without one is just a building.

Bernard Tschumi

#35. The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#36. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

#37. The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.

Saul Steinberg

#38. Constructing a strong and beautiful sentence is the highest form of architecture. Because whereupon seeing a beautiful building one may think, but to read a sentence one has to think.

Garry Fitchett

#39. This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture.

Malcolm Miller

#40. In architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

Ayn Rand

#41. Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

Frank Gehry

#42. A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.

Louis I. Kahn

#43. By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

Martin Filler

#44. Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

Bjarke Ingels

#45. A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

John Irving

#46. 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.

Hannah Ware

#47. Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

Arthur Erickson

#48. We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.

Alain De Botton

#49. Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

Helmut Jahn

#50. My architecture tends to be legible, light and flexible. You can read it. You look at a building, and you can see how it is constructed. I put the structure outside.

Richard Rogers

#51. When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."

Emilio Ambasz

#52. No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

Graham Greene

#53. No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

Michael Ende

#54. You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?

Patricia Marx

#55. To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

Martha Graham

#56. No matter how hard life is, you are your own architecture. If you give up then there's no one that can help you, but if you want to keep building your future, then no one can stop you either.

Jaejoong

#57. The building is a special place because of its architecture; But it's people who make it special by participating in it.

Charlie Chaplin

#58. The building is absolutely stunning. It is a magnificent and important piece of architecture that contributes greatly to the cultural landscape of Washington. It is one the best designed buildings in D.C. in the last decade.

Zelda Fichandler

#59. Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.

John C. Portman Jr.

#60. Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.

Terry Pratchett

#61. A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#62. The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.

Thomas A Kempis

#63. I started to draw buildings. I called them Proposed Colossal Monuments - they weren't for real, not for actual building. It was more a critique of architecture.

Claes Oldenburg

#64. It is better to have a plain, substantial building, with no extravagance about it, but without a debt, than to have the most splendid specimen of Gothic architecture that is overlaid by a mortgage.

William Mackergo Taylor

#65. Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

Thomas Fuller

#66. The building's identity resided in the ornament.

Louis Sullivan

#67. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

John Ruskin

#68. [The building] had been designed by an architect, so it bore little resemblance to any normal structure.

Gary Corby

#69. As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.

Benjamin H. Bratton

#70. Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

John Osborne

#71. In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.

Alain Robert

#72. A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.

David Chipperfield

#73. Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

Paul Goldberger

#74. I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Ayn Rand

#75. A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

Helmut Jahn

#76. All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

Martin Filler

#77. Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked Godzilla porn.

Christopher Moore

#78. It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.

Max Barry

#79. 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.

John Portman

#80. 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.

Jason Silva

#81. Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.

Kenneth Frampton

#82. Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#83. As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

Janet Echelman

#84. In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.

Edward J. Fraughton

#85. A bold architectural statement turns a public building into a landmark, but it is in the details where the architect becomes the real storyteller.

Curtis W. Fentress

#86. In proportion as architecture degenerated, printing throve and flourished. The capital of forces which human thought had expended in building, it henceforth expended in books.

Victor Hugo

#87. Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

Michael Graves

#88. It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

Zaha Hadid

#89. The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.

Michael Hansmeyer

#90. The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

John Irving

#91. 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.

David Allan Coe

#92. Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

Arne Jacobsen

#93. Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person.

Alain De Botton

#94. White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.

Al Sharpton

#95. 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.

Amanda Hearst

#96. Yes," Tanner nodded. "I have great appreciation for neoclassical architecture. The ten pillars in the portico give the building a remarkable feeling of dignity and charm."

Bethany lowered her eyes and stifled a giggle. When Tanner put on an act, he put it on well.

Carol Kinsey

#97. You Don't Need To Jump Off Of A Building To Appreciate Architecture

Dean Cavanagh

#98. I am always surprised by how much little emphasis schools of architecture, and indeed, many architects, place on the process of the mating of a building.

Norman Foster

#99. 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.

Alvar Aalto

#100. Honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

Sarah Vowell