Quotes About Architecture

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.

I became intrigued with the whole development sector, going into a community, building it up, coming up with a plan from an architectural standpoint, and bringing it to fruition, especially if you're able to make the community a better place in the process.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

And I loved Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he was the greatest man I have ever met in my life.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Man-made things, buildings, boats, etc., we see more decidedly than the other things in a landscape.

For it seems that long before the first enterprising man bent some twigs into a leaky roof, many animals were already accomplished builders.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.

thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples.

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

I love seeing New York City Ballet from the fourth ring, just seeing the architecture of how these bodies move from above.

There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.