Best 659 quotes in «architecture quotes» category

We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

We need better architecture and planning: more imaginatively exciting, more involving, more our own.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.

What connects architecture and music is that neither one is really an object. It's more like an ambience, a surrounding and a context. You can do other things while you're listening to music and of course, you can do other things while you're in the middle of architecture. The notion of multi-attention seems to me like it's the keynote to the beginning of the 21st century.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one.

What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.

When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.

When I started designing in school, I discovered that I had a knack for it. I fell completely in love with architecture, and I remain in love with it.

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?

When you want to do something that is challenging or interesting or new, you never find the place. All the places are obvious or old or generic. And so you realize that the role of architecture is fundamental.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

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?

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

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.

You can't make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.

You don't need to spend a lot of money on stuff when you have amazing architecture.

You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

Architecture cannot change the economic machinations of globalization.

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.

All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but abides steadily on to the very end of life.

Architectural education is notably under-theorised as an underlying discipline, though is clearly intensely theorised as a set of surface actions. It has remained largely unbothered by reformist educational movements such as critical pedagogy, with the result that its central structures and methods have altered little since they were founded in the École des Beaux Arts in the early C19.

...architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...

Arhitectura are un alt sens și alte scopuri decât doar de a scoate în evidență construcția și de a răspunde unor necesități. Arhitectura este arta prin excelență, care atinge starea de măreție platoniciană, de ordine matematică, de speculație spirituală, de percepere a armoniei prin raporturi emoționale. Iată scopul arhitecturii.

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.

And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe, I continued, and then I broke off for Walter's sake.

Architecture is about the understanding of the world and turning it into a more meaningful and humane place. -Juhani Pallasmaa

As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metal work as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

...but there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall, 4) That the miseries (If the present Life, and the Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game. Why, do we not believe the very Infants to be the Heirs of Hell and Children of the Devil as soon as they are disclos'd to the World? I declare that I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghil Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature. I have only room to add: there is a mad-drunken Catch, Hey ho! The Devil is dead! If that be true, I have been in the wrong Suit all my Life.

Bathrooms that traded mirrors for glass walls invited prurience on occasion, but they also drew the inhabitant's gaze away from himself toward an increasingly threatened nature.

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon. That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon. - So it is. - I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions. - All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it? - It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean. - Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture. - Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

Beautiful building,” Phoebe said. Sam nodded. “Classical Revival,” he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have learned about building styles and understand what Classical Revival meant. They could have intelligent discussions about things like rooflines and columns.

Brasília é, na verdade, paisagem. "Se tirassem meu retrato em pé em Brasilia, quando revelassem a fotografia só sairia a paisagem", escreveu Clarice Lispector num famoso ensaio sobre a capital; e, de fato, a paisagem é tão opressora que encontrar-se preso em todo esse espaço é tão aterrorizante quanto ficar trancado numa sala pequena sem janelas.

Brutalist architecture was Modernism's angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's devided between 'eyesores' and 'icons'; fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ...project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion.

Designed in a 'Pueblo Deco' style, which blends Mission with Art Deco influences, the DCA tower is a composite modeled after real Hollywood landmarks built in the 1920's; possible influences include the Hollywood Tower at 6200 Franklin Avenue, The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard and the Chateau Marmont at 8221 Sunset Boulevard.

Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world.

Cubism is a part of the daily life in Spain, it is in Spanish architecture. The architecture of other countries always follows the line of the landscape . . . but Spanish architecture always cuts the lines of the landscape.

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.

Contemporary architecture was of necessity mediocre.

Det skal Luftwaffe ha: Da de knuste våre bygninger, erstattet de dem ikke med noe mer provoserende enn ruiner. Vi gikk enda lenger. (Om pariserhjulet London Eye, gjendiktet av Torbjørn Færøvik)

Design is fluid. It's liquid. It moves like water and fills every space...

Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

Even if the chance of impacting global change is slight and we don't know our chances of success, our ethical obligation is not simply to advance architecture, but to find ways to advance society and expand people's networks -- one local intervention at a time.

Even a brick wants to be something. A brick wants to be something. It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is.