Architecture Quotes
422 quotes
"Stairs, are they going up or are they going down? They’re so confusing! If love were a physical thing, it would be stairs."
"I make love like the 13th floor is the 14th floor of a hotel. I give it that little extra that takes it to a whole new level."
"New streets should be Twitter friendly and be named with hashtags up front. I’d build a house on #LoversLane."
"The sides of buildings should be like the tops of lakes. I’d fish through your window hoping to catch a smile."
"We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both."
"As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S"- is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means."
"For me, it does not 'miss' if (the Potteries Thinkbelt study) goes into the archive, not as an example of how railway carriages can be used for teaching, but as one of the most powerful question marks ever placed against the architecture of university education."
"(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."
"Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city."
"I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture."
"The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of."
"I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away."
"It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?"
"The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture."
"Whatever good things we build end up building us."
"A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom."
"We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it."
"I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening to me they are one."
"My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people."
"The higher the building the lower the morals."
"A house is a machine for living in."
"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."
"Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator."
"I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture."
"Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us."
"Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart."
"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins."
"I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me."
"Architecture is the reaching out for the truth."
"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."
"Make big plans aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die."
"Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise."
"To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it."
"To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that."
"Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times."
"Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have."
"But the building's identity resided in the ornament."
"It is not the beauty of a building you should look at its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time."
"I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?"
"A city building, you experience when you walk a suburban building, you experience when you drive."
"Every building is a prototype. No two are alike."
"I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people."
"We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless."
"Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life."
"What people want, above all, is order."
"The interior of the house personifies the private world the exterior of it is part of the outside world."
"If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness."
"Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings."
"Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns."
"Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things."
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