Quotes About Architecture

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

I must say that it's easy to write nice things about Chicago because it's that kind of town.

Throughout history, men have made many things to contain God: churches, temples, denominations, ceremonies. All of these have mixed motives and chequered histories. God doesn't 'need' any of these things, but it is in humanity's nature to keep building houses, and it is in God's nature to keep turning up.

Ryder - the oldest, Avery continued. He's standing as job boss on this project. Owen's the detail guy, runs the numbers, makes the calls, takes the meetings. Or most of them. Beckett's an architect.

Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is Phi, after the sculptor Phidias. The architecture of you.

You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column. This how-to stuff isn't in any history book.

The Empire was not known for its roomy architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term, austere pragmatism, or sometimes pragmatic austerity, found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow.

Did you know the Death Star had a bar? Ugly, austere little place – really like all Imperial architecture, ugh – and the selection of spirits was hardly commendable.

They generally packaged known technologies in a unique architecture and enabled the use of these products in applications where magnetic data storage and retrieval previously had not been technologically or economically feasible.

Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned.

Yes, Istanbul does live up to its nickname as the 'Queen of Cities.' Born to the Greeks, raised by the Romans, and matured under the Ottomans.

CONSTRUCTION ON SAN QUENTIN PRISON BEGAN auspiciously on Bastille Day, July 14, 1852.

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music. 131

a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

But just ahead, two buildings stood taller than the rest: the Twin Towers.

accounts from Magellan's time mention their daunting stern castles, their multiple decks, and the profusion of obras muertas, or "dead wood

Like medicine (architecture) must move from the curative to the preventive.

A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement of the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.

Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.

Architecture is slow and therefore requires anticipatory design.