Architecture's Quotes

#1. Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me ... the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

Barbara Kruger

#2. The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It's about a way of thinking

Jacque Fresco

#3. When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.

Stephen Kanner

#4. Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.

Mario Botta

#5. The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.

Michel Hazanavicius

#6. Everyone used to want to be star architects. That's no longer the case.

Shigeru Ban

#7. Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.

Invader

#8. 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.

Thom Mayne

#9. I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#10. The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Bridges McCall

#11. There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.

Annabelle Selldorf

#12. Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

Harry Seidler

#13. 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

#14. We all love musical architecture; there's no doubt about that.

Levon Helm

#15. I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

Zaha Hadid

#16. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

Nina Jacobson

#17. I like to play with architecture! It's my favorite game.

Jean Nouvel

#18. Architecture is not about designing somehting from a free, fanciful idea. It is about discovering and establishing one's own principle, some kind of regularity - finding an individual formula to apply to one's buildings.

Shigeru Ban

#19. 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.

George Lucas

#20. It's time for architecture to do things again, not just represent things.

Joshua Prince-Ramus

#21. The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.

Robert Aris Willmott

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

John Osborne

#23. In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Nancy Banks-Smith

#24. I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Will Self

#25. I think all writing about art is in some way dancing to architecture. It's all about similitude, being analogous, metaphorical, adjectival, etc.

Rob Chapman

#26. Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company's profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy.

Jakob Nielsen

#27. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that's not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that's always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it." He

Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Louis Sullivan

#29. If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

Evelyn Waugh

#30. I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

Michael Graves

#31. I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

Michael Ian Black

#32. You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.

Michael Ian Black

#33. I've gradually fooled myself into becoming a real painter ... I really just like to sit in my air-conditioned Rome painting studio surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance architecture and to hold a tube of Alizarin Madder Lake in my artist's hand and marvel at the shiny goop inside.

Mark Kostabi

#34. There is much to learn from architecture before it became an expert's art.

Bernard Rudofsky

#35. 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.

Thom Mayne

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

Thomas Fuller

#37. The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.

Joel Coen

#38. Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.

E. E. Cummings

#39. 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.

Paul Bettany

#40. There's something very special about seeing history so clearly in front of you through that architecture that you just don't get in the U.S. If I was asked to choose where I'd most like to live, I would always choose London.

Charlie Cox

#41. Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

Maya Lin

#42. Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

I.M. Pei

#43. At about five I knew I was going to be an architect because my mother had studied architecture. I thought it was women's work. I had a proprietary feeling about architecture. I could own it because my mother owned it.

Denise Scott Brown

#44. I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it's worth I did it.

Yves Saint-Laurent

#45. There are a lot of bad films out there. There's a lot of bad architecture out there, and I think sometimes it takes a lot of time to begin to see what's really good. And I think what the test seems to be is, what really sticks with you. And what really becomes a part of your life.

Nathaniel Kahn

#46. Don't go where it is all fine music and grand talk and beautiful architecture; those things will neither fill anybody's stomach, nor feed his soul. Go where the gospel is preached, the gospel that really feeds your soul, and go often.

Charles Spurgeon

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

Charlie Chaplin

#48. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

Elvis Costello

#49. 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

#50. There's certain things in life that I love. One is architecture. And music, culture, food, people. New Orleans has all of that.

Lenny Kravitz

#51. 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

#52. The Fire Department has traditionally considered architecture a priority only when it's burning down.

Justin Davidson

#53. The thing about architecture is that it's an art [you] simply learn more by doing more. It's one of those things that is really not an art about thinking, but doing. So in a way, what it has done is greatly intensify the way that I build.

David Adjaye

#54. Steiner's teachings begin and end with man but in between is humankind, the earth, the cosmos. Architecture is the same: it too begins and ends with individual man, with everything else within it.

Kenneth Bayes

#55. Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.

Jack Dangermond

#56. The meaning resides in one's own experience, making the everyday the exceptional.

Samuel Mockbee

#57. The architecture - the mind - is knitting together. It's sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don't know something.

Scott Hutchins

#58. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.

Christian De Portzamparc

#59. Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor's love wrought in living stones.

Edwin Arnold

#60. Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

Charles Jencks

#61. 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.

Roman Coppola

#62. If we continue to treat content as an extra to information architecture, to content management or to anything else, we miss a bright opportunity to influence users. Content is not a nice-to-have extra. Content is a star of the user experience show. Let's make content shine.

Colleen Jones

#63. One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."

Daniel Clowes

#64. The Office's prime approach to architecture ... is one of continuous ANTICIPATORY DESIGN.

Cedric Price

#65. Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look - all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that's what excites me.

Tom Ford

#66. 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.

Sufjan Stevens

#67. Every McDonald's, for instance, looks the same - the company deliberately tries to standardize stores' architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines.

Anonymous

#68. Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it's frustratingly neglected by many teams.

Simon Brown

#69. In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.

Rem Koolhaas

#70. I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#71. The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it.

Claire Tomalin

#72. People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

Rem Koolhaas

#73. I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling.

Brad Pitt

#74. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

Aldous Huxley

#75. 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

#76. There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

Rem Koolhaas

#77. I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

Frank Gehry

#78. There's a technicality to designing and wearing hats. A hat is balancing the proportions of your face; it's like architecture or mathematics.

Philip Treacy

#79. Titles by their nature imply that the play's architecture is like a bull's-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.

Sarah Ruhl

#80. It's not my duty as an architect to look at it

Zaha Hadid

#81. Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.

Frank Gehry

#82. I don't know what London's coming to - the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

Noel Coward

#83. Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Larry Wall

#84. 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

#85. If you examine this, I think that you will find that it's the mechanics of Japanese architecture that have been thought of as the direct influence upon our architecture.

Minoru Yamasaki

#86. On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century

Ross King

#87. The architecture of the song, if it's built properly, can withstand all kinds of things.

Emily Haines

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

Arne Jacobsen

#89. New York's architecture alone is enough to inspire a whole album. In fact, that's what happened at first - my early stuff was mostly just interpretations of landscapes.

Lana Del Rey

#90. Architecture has curled up in a ball and it's about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you're not sure if it's good or bad but at least it's interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.

David Chipperfield

#91. Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

Steven Holl

#92. Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#93. Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Samuel Butler

#94. Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.

Daniel Libeskind

#95. Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana's body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed.

Kurt Vonnegut

#96. 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.

Arne Jacobsen

#97. Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

Arne Jacobsen

#98. 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.

Joshua Bell

#99. If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession's responsibilities.

Samuel Mockbee

#100. Type is one of the most eloquent means of expression in every epoch of style. Next to architecture, it gives the most characteristic portrait of a period and the most severe testimony of a nation's intellectual status.

Peter Behrens