Best 659 quotes in «architecture quotes» category

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.

When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain falls through the open roof against the marble floor and lightning scissors through the wild and roiled skies. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt the temple to honor gods no longer worshiped, but you can feel the brute passion in that ardor in the Pantheon's grand and harmonious shape. I think gods have rarely been worshiped so well.

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context." - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994

When we place the essentials activities of life within the context of a Consciously Designed Home, it becomes easier to achieve our lifestyle goals and dreams.

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.

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 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.

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.

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.

You are my other self

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A Gothic church is a petrified religion.

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

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

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

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

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.

A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.

a man who builds a house never really dies.

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

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

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.

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.

Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. Im not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Architecture is much more than a profession; It's a discipline.

Architecture is not a profession, it is a discipline.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values.

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

Architecture is changing faster than some other professions.

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

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.