Best 659 quotes in «architecture quotes» category

While for critics of sprawl the generic signifies a loss of local identity and connection to place, for Koolhaas it represents an opportunity for reinvention and fantasy free from nostalgia or provincial habit. He admires the generic's accessibility, impermanence, economy of imagination, and malleable lack of authenticity or moralizing agenda.

With a mixture of naïveté and British arrogance, she had always thought of London as the center of all culture and knowledge, but Paris was a revelation. The city was astonishingly modern, making London look like a dowdy country cousin. And yet for all its intellectual and social advancements, the streets of Paris were nearly medieval in appearance; dark, narrow and crooked as they twined through arrondissements of artfully shaped buildings. It was a messy, delightful assault to the senses, with architecture that ranged from the gothic spires of ancient churches to the solid grandeur of the Arc de Triomphe.

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.

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible, I shall avoid the expression of any opinion as to the objective truth or falsehood of the systems of theological speculation of which I may find occasion to speak. From my present point of view, theology is regarded as a natural product of the operations of the human mind, under the conditions of its existence, just as any other branch of science, or the arts of architecture, or music, or painting are such products. Like them, theology has a history. Like them also, it is to be met with in certain simple and rudimentary forms; and these can be connected by a multitude of gradations, which exist or have existed, among people of various ages and races, with the most highly developed theologies of past and present times.

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

You are my other self

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

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

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

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.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

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

A Gothic church is a petrified religion.

After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.

A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.

A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of authentic democracy.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

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.

Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.

Architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

Architecture isn't just about creating new buildings, sometimes its about retuning what's already there.

Architecture is politics.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.

Architects cannot teach nature anything.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Architecture can't force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make the meeting places useful and attractive.

Architecture has joined the world of fashion, but fashion is passing and architecture is timeless.

Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.

Architecture is not about space but about time.

Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.

Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.

Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms.

Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.

Architecture should be dedicated to keeping the outside out and the inside in.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.