Top 60 Good Architecture Quotes
#1. If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.
Brian Foote
#2. There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.
Eduardo Souto De Moura
#3. Good architecture lets nature in.
Mario Pei
#4. I think that as good architecture enhances a city, a good cut enhances the definition and expression of a face.
Vidal Sassoon
#5. If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it's fine with me. I'm interested in good architecture as anybody else.
Louis Kahn
#6. Good architecture is necessary to give programs enough structure to be able to grow large without collapsing into a puddle of confusion.
Douglas Crockford
#7. Princeton is a sublime undergraduate university. It has a good architecture school.
Emilio Ambasz
#9. You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
John Ruskin
#10. The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.
Annabelle Selldorf
#11. Some architects think of clients only as sources of work and income but most good architecture is in fact the result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client.
Roger K. Lewis
#12. 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
#13. Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#14. Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#15. You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.
But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in.
Le Corbusier
#16. 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.
Richard Meier
#17. Good design, like good painting, cooking, architecture or whatever you like, is a manifestation of the capacity of the human spirit to transcend its limitations.
George Nelson
#18. There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
Peter Zumthor
#19. If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
Edith Wharton
#20. Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.
Jeanne Gang
#21. 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.
Stefan Sagmeister
#22. Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.
Zaha Hadid
#23. A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.
Mark Helprin
#24. 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.
Martin Filler
#25. I am inspired by music, travel, great architecture, and good, healthy food. I look for opportunities to learn about history, art, and cooking. When I learn, I grow.
Tim Matheson
#26. Management has to provide the coordinating mechanism between what the supplier provides and what the user needs in not-good-enough situations where product architecture is consequently interdependent. Management always beats markets when there is not sufficient information.
Clayton Christensen
#27. Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.
Audrey Niffenegger
#28. The majestic architecture, the cultivated manners, the simplicity of life, the disregard for one's fellow man, the plagues, the rampant corruption, the unmitigated racism, and the uncontrollable violence--all the things our grandparents called 'the good old days'...
Chris Elliott
#29. 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?
Jeremy Renner
#30. If the architecture is any good, a person who looks and listens will feel its good effects without noticing.
Carlo Scarpa
#32. Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#33. Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself. Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.
Luis Barragan
#34. Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. he will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#35. Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal - the vision, the structure, the architecture.
Joshua Bell
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Britain loves a bargain, but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap.
David Chipperfield
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.
Leon Krier
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Leon Krier
#44. Releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform.
Timothee Besset
#45. 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.
James Polshek
#46. I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.
Julius Shulman
#47. I had some good opportunities. I was lucky to have had the chance to do things differently. Architecture is about surprise.
Oscar Niemeyer
#48. We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain De Botton
#49. I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
#50. I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Cherie Lunghi
#52. Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
Roger Scruton
#53. Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.
Stephen Gardiner
#54. 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.
Bob Barr
#55. The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.
David Chipperfield
#56. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art
Daniel H. Pink
#57. 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
#58. Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.
Kevin McCloud
#59. The pencil and computer are, if left to their own devices, equally dumb and only as good as the person driving them.
Norman Foster
#60. 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
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