On Architecture Quotes

#1. The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.

Michael Graves

#2. 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

#3. The universe is not a rigid and immutable edifice where independent matter is housed in independent space and time; it is on the contrary an amorphous continuum, without any fixed architecture, plastic and variable, constantly subject to change and distortion.

Lincoln Barnett

#4. God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is, at least for me, an abuse of paper.

Alvar Aalto

#5. It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.

Alain De Botton

#6. Manicured grounds of well-hidden mansions. At any other time Doug would have been slowing the car, peering through the trees, on the lookout for interesting old architecture. Because Douglas Llewellyn was an architect, the senior partner

Kasey Michaels

#7. Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety , and Economy.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

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

Michael Graves

#9. 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

#10. [It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.

Robert Moses

#11. 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

#12. The show is called 'The Office,' and while it focuses on the people, the architecture of the space is very important.

Brian Baumgartner

#13. Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

Charles Jencks

#14. 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.

Jonathan Hickman

#15. Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#16. 'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

Claes Oldenburg

#17. The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Rem Koolhaas

#18. As scientists put it, the brain is plastic, or moldable. Yes, the actual physical architecture of the brain changes based on what happens to us.

Daniel J. Siegel

#19. Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.

Robert Charles Wilson

#20. We have to base architecture on the environment.

Toyo Ito

#21. The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Jay Chiat

#22. Throughout the Middle Ages, art and architecture had a spiritual mission: to direct man's attention toward God. Churches soared in that direction, and sculpture and paintings pointed the way to paradise. They depicted the sufferings of Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, the Last Judgment, and so on.

Jesse Bryant Wilder

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

William Devane

#26. 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

#27. As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do.

Jimenez Lai

#28. The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

Mukesh Ambani

#29. Architecture does not change anything. It's always on the side of the wealthy. The important thing is to believe that it can make life better.

Oscar Niemeyer

#30. Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Ernest Hemingway,

#31. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

Peter Watson

#32. Of course! We laid waste their fleets, attacked their outpost worlds. ... And the Forerunners themselves found a way to bring down the indestructible architecture of the Precursors, on Charum Hakkor. ... Charum Hakkor, once called the Eternal.

Greg Bear

#33. Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

I.M. Pei

#34. Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

Tadao Ando

#35. Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability.

Hermann Zapf

#36. In Jack Nasar's research on American's taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects.

Winifred Gallagher

#37. You can just drift unhappily towards this vision of heaven on earth, and ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of: Heaven on earth, at it's best.

Ben Nicholson

#38. You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Thom Mayne

#39. Architecture was always the plan. I always figured I'd just do theater on the side.

Michael Lomenda

#40. I just hand shoes on the wall. They're architecture you know.

Tori Amos

#41. To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.

Frei Otto

#42. Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis.

Tadao Ando

#43. Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

Marshall McLuhan

#44. The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Robert A. M. Stern

#45. I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events ... by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator.

Lebbeus Woods

#46. My dad is a carpenter, a joiner, and I used to watch him make things. So I always imagined that I'd do something where I made things, too. I was really more interested in architecture growing up because I would work with my dad on houses.

Christopher Bailey

#47. Architecture is an applied art, founded not on theories but on practice.

Witold Rybczynski

#48. About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.

Max Walker

#49. One of my favorite vacation places is Miami, because of the people, the water and the beach - of course - and the architecture on Miami Beach is so wonderful.

Oksana Baiul

#50. When a Mannerist artist breaks rules he does so on the basis of knowledge and not of ignorance. A considerable amount of North European architecture of the sixteenth century must be excluded for these reasons.

John Shearman

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

Robert A. Heinlein

#52. The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn't be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.

Gretchen Rubin

#53. Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

Renzo Piano

#54. With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky.

Clara Chow

#55. 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

#56. Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#57. The exchange between different cultures can not possibly be seen as a threat, when it is friendly. But I believe that the dissatisfaction with the overall architecture often depends on the quality of leadership.

Amartya Sen

#58. 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.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#59. Did not pleasure depend on an architecture of perspective
on contrast and delay, withholding and loss? Did not true enjoyment rely in facing the future?

Gordon Dahlquist

#60. 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

#61. Sometimes you are garrulous, Taita.' Pharaoh was less than captivated by my lecture on the palace architecture. 'Get on

Wilbur Smith

#62. I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.

Banana Yoshimoto

#63. You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony.

Renzo Piano

#64. At any other time Doug would have been slowing the car, peering through the trees, on the lookout for interesting old architecture. Because Douglas Llewellyn was an architect, the senior partner of

Kasey Michaels

#65. I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the earth, I see -
- architects and earthquakes - empaths and robots - fictions and near misses - lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming.
I see us - trying on ways of being - so sweet and messy, so worthwhile.

Laurie Perez

#66. Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. Everything else is not architecture, but a criminal act which has taken on form.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

#67. The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.
(on Elgar)

Thomas Beecham

#68. I'd rather any kind of business on the ground floor than the utter lack of respect for pedestrians with which buildings are put up in this city today. . . . Nobody cares any more about pedestrian identity.

Claudia Pineiro

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Britain loves a bargain, but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap.

David Chipperfield

#73. The yachts' berth was next to the Yas Marina Circuit, where Formula 1 would come into town once a year. At night, when the lights on its orbicular architecture switched on, the circuit would radiate like a constellation of stars

Soroosh Shahrivar

#74. 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

#75. 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.

Leon Krier

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man's life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence,

Eero Saarinen

#80. I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao ... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

Frank Gehry

#81. Qafzeh's algorithms - if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer - led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran.

Alastair Reynolds

#82. For example, they recently had a piece on a character
I think his name was Ambrosio D'Urbervilles
whose "design statement" was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it "Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath.

Mark Helprin

#83. 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

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

Daniel Libeskind

#85. A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

Ezra Pound

#86. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

Cormac McCarthy

#87. 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

#88. I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

Peter Zumthor

#89. People wouldn't know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them.

Patti Smith

#90. 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

#91. Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

Ernest Dimnet

#92. It was stated, ... that the value of architecture depended on two distinct characters:
the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation.

John Ruskin

#93. In music I do not look for logic. I am quite intuitive on the whole and know no theories. I never like a work if I cannot intuitively grasp its inner unity (architecture).

Albert Einstein

#94. We depend on computers when we ourselves haven't mastered the principles behind what we are asking computers to design.
Glenn Murcutt - A Singular Architectural Practice page 16

Glenn Murcutt

#95. 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

#96. In all matters but particularly in architecture ... that which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles ... One who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

#97. The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.

David Chipperfield

#98. On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

Ross Macdonald

#99. Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.

Zaha Hadid

#100. I'm drawn to furniture design as complete architecture on a minor scale.

Brad Pitt