Best 659 quotes in «architecture quotes» category

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.

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.

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 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 are my other self

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

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.

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

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 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 Gothic church is a petrified religion.

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

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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 enable you to accommodate complexity and change. If you don't have Enterprise Architecture, your enterprise is not going to be viable in a increasingly complex and changing external environment.

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.

Architecture is supposed to complete nature. Great architecture makes nature more beautiful-it gives it power.

Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

Architecture is too slow in its realisation to be a 'problem solver'.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.

Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.

Architecture aims at Eternity

Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it.

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

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.