Top 100 Quotes About The Architecture
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.
James Rouse
#4. It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
Oscar Niemeyer
#5. Britain loves a bargain, but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap.
David Chipperfield
#6. He was of opinion that what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought properly and truly be named Saracenick Architecture refined by the Christians.
Christopher Wren
#7. My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
Ben Van Berkel
#8. I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
Roy Lichtenstein
#9. Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend ... they can all go drifting by unseen if you're not careful.
Ian McKellen
#10. 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
#11. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life.
Gretchen Rubin
#12. 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.
Herbert Simon
#13. The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#14. Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.
Thom Mayne
#15. I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
Maya Lin
#16. I've never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.
Oren Peli
#17. Unlike the past decades, the present moment is lacking in architectural discourse.
Lebbeus Woods
#18. 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
#19. For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect.
Cameron Sinclair
#20. Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.
Christian De Portzamparc
#21. The manner in which the Americans are subdivided into sects also conflicts with any commendable desire that may exist to build glorious temples in honor of the Deity: and convenience is more consulted than taste, perhaps, in all that relates to ecclesiastical architecture. Nevertheless,
James Fenimore Cooper
#22. I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
Susan Vreeland
#23. When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.
H.P. Lovecraft
#24. 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.
Frank Gehry
#25. We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements.
Tony Scott
#26. I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.
Alan Bennett
#27. 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
#28. Architecture is about ideas in the first place. You don't get to design until you have an idea.
Lebbeus Woods
#29. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#30. We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power ... a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#31. To me ... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting.
Ruth Bernhard
#32. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#33. There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years.
Larry Ellison
#34. Her way with the chaos in her mind was to cultivate it through the articulations of others, by which she meant the reading of a lifetime with whose aid she created the interesting architecture and geography of herself.
Austin Wright
#35. Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.
Oscar Niemeyer
#36. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
Goldwin Smith
#37. 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.
#38. Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.
Freya Stark
#39. 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
#40. Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.
John Portman
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.
Alvar Aalto
#44. Art in progress. MAK has occupied a unique and valuable space as international host for discourse between the arts and architecture.
Thom Mayne
#45. 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
#46. Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.
Bruce Jackson
#47. The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.
Cameron Sinclair
#48. Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor's love wrought in living stones.
Edwin Arnold
#49. I see her body as an arousing work of architecture. A sky-scraping building that I wouldn't mind laying over a mountain to inject my whale-sized shank through its front entrance, knocking the doorman out of the way and flooding the lobby once I am finished with her.
Carlton Mellick III
#50. Architecture is not just for the moment, it is not just for the next fashion magazine
Daniel Libeskind
#51. 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.
Antony Gormley
#52. My architecture is the architecture of survival.
Frei Otto
#53. In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.
Amy Waldman
#54. Gravity is the insidious enemy of the animate.
Lebbeus Woods
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture.
James C. Snyder
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.
Julia Morgan
#62. Forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and it is in the forests that men have grasped the first idea of architecture.
Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand
#63. 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
#64. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. 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
#66. In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
Michael Graves
#67. What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain De Botton
#68. As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost.
Harry Von Zell
#69. In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. The architecture of the song, if it's built properly, can withstand all kinds of things.
Emily Haines
#71. Today is just the beginning of Kepler. Because of its super energy-efficient architecture, we will extend GPUs into datacenters, to super thin notebooks, to superphones.
Jen-Hsun Huang
#72. I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.
Vitruvius
#73. The practice of architecture not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement.
Samuel
#74. Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.
Daniel Libeskind
#75. Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
Simone Weil
#76. 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
#77. Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.
Spiro Kostof
#78. Modern man has lost the sense of wonder
about the unknown and he treats it as
an enemy.
Laurens Van Der Post
#79. Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?
Nancy Banks-Smith
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Martin Filler
#82. When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
#83. I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#84. Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.
Steven Johnson
#85. Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.
Martin Filler
#86. Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.
Le Corbusier
#87. The criteria for architecture after the tsunami is humbleness
Kengo Kuma
#88. 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
#89. Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.
Goldwin Smith
#90. God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is, at least for me, an abuse of paper.
Alvar Aalto
#91. I didn't know what architecture was except that I lived in a house. I don't even think that I knew the word for a long time. My dad funneled me into engineering because it was his background.
Antoine Predock
#92. The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Terence McKenna
#94. In Architecture there is a part that is the result of Logical Reasoning and a part that is created through the Senses. There is always a point where they Clash. I don't think Architecture can be created without that Collision.
Tadao Ando
#95. 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.
Dan Brown
#96. Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, hasbeen respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
Rem Koolhaas
#97. We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.
Glenn Murcutt
#98. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
Herbert Spencer
#99. A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.
Leon Krier
#100. The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant, but minimalism.
Kevin McCloud
