Quotes About Architecture

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

All civilisation begins with a theocracy and ends with a democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture.

In proportion as architecture degenerated, printing throve and flourished. The capital of forces which human thought had expended in building, it henceforth expended in books.

The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness.

At that time, for the thought written in stone, there existed a privilege perfectly comparable to our present liberty of the press. It was the liberty of architecture.

The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden.

architecture is dead, with no ghost to return, killed by the printed book because it did not last as long and cost more.

When put into print, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, intangible, indestructible; it mingles with the air. In the time of architecture, it became a mountain, and made itself master of a century and a region. Now it has been transformed into a flock of birds, scattering to the four winds and filling all air and space.

But architecture will no more be the social, collective, dominant art. The great poem, the great work of humankind will never again be built but printed.

Built in the seventies, I'd guess, back when just about everything was ugly. There

Mexico City has been ranked amongst the worst cities in the world in terms of urban planning,

MADRID SPAIN

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

It looked for all the world as Karou had described it in her one brief e-mail to Zuzana: like a sandcastle, a very big sandcastle. It was monumental: an entire town, really – lanes and plazas, neighborhoods, a caravansary, granary, and palace – all of it echoing empty. Its creators had dreamed on a legendary scale, and to stand in its flagstone court, mud walls and peaked roofs jutting overhead, was to feel shrunk to the size of a songbird.

As an architectural marvel, Bethlem appeared in at least thirty-six tourist guides in 1681.

In the 1830s, designers wanted buildings that looked Gothic, but they had no real understanding of the planning and construction behind it. This dichotomy is evident in Charles Barry's Houses of Parliament: Gothic topdressing on an essentially Classical building. (Passing the Houses of Parliament one day, Augustus Welby Pugin commented: 'All Grecian, sir. Tudor details on a Classic body.

Against all odds, Bethlem survived. The Bishopsgate building endured the Civil War, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London a year later, after which the hospital's governors realised that it needed a new home. In 1676 'New Bedlam' opened in Moorfields, with patients transferred to a 'palace beautiful' designed by the genius polymath Robert Hooke.

In Hong Kong, some high-rises are missing all floor numbers with 4, such as 4, 14, 24, 34, and all of the 40s. That's why Hong Kong elevators are the fastest in the world: They arrive quickly at floor 50.

Those two really tall buildings are the World Trade Center — the Twin Towers.

I like things that are kind of eclectic, when one thing doesn't go with another. That's why I love Rome. The town itself is that way. It's where Fascist architecture meets classic Renaissance, where the ancient bangs up against the contemporary. It has a touch of everything. That's my style, and that's what my work is about.

The design of a dress, furniture, a house, a room, a street and a city are all the same process.

As an architect, I learned to think and express myself on flat forms, on paper, and to imagine the contour of the lines of a design.

John Hennessy and David Patterson: they are titled Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (both published by Morgan Kaufmann).

All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.