Quotes About Architecture

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.

In every area of the world where there is earthquake risk, there are still many buildings of this type; it is very frustrating to try to get rid of them.

Most architects say: I want to use this type of glass, even if it's too reflective or doesn't let enough light in. However, the use of a certain type of glass might change the comfort level.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.

One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 - you can't actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you've already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

If I wanted to do clothes or if I wanted to make a building or design a choreography, you are able to do that - they are all under a similar kind of design umbrella.

India - I've always felt at home there. Delhi and Mumbai and the Taj Mahal are all incredible - but it's the people I love. Indians are so interesting and accommodating and friendly. The best hotel I've stayed at there is the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur: its architecture is unbelievable.

Istanbul is an unbelievable city, just really beautiful and the people are really, really nice.

I have a place in Chicago and I get there as much as I can... The city is so unbelievably beautiful. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I'm in Chicago. It slows down and I feel more at ease.

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

Lovely high ceilings, ' I said. 'If you were very tall, you'd feel quite comfortable in here.

We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It's like hunger and thirst — you need them both.

Architecture's original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism.

While architecture's sense of disciplinary inferiority ultimately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture's Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with the development of modern capitalism on the one hand […] and avant-garde strategies of opposition on the other.

Today, I would say at last, this disciplinary Tourette's syndrome, where suddenly and even in the face of tremendous productivity architecture still blurts out a sense of shame, is starting to be understood as self-imposed and more likely to prolong paralysis than move the discipline further.

Insisting that architecture maintain such a profound lack of character without even the hint of any feeling is not a lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a commitment to a once progressive but now painfully outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pursuit of universality and utopia is today just banal accommodation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.