Quotes About Architecture

Oh! Who can be ever tired of Bath?

And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as what one reads about may produce? Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?

The Seed Cathedral.

Googie architecture could...be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. There are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors.

Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude

the presence of buildings around a park is important in design. They enclose it. They make a definite shape out of the space, so that it appears as an important event in the city scene, a positive feature, rather than a no-account leftover.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

The only way, I think, to combat vacuums in these cases is to rely on extraordinarily strong counterforces close by. This means that population concentration ought to be made deliberately high (and diverse) near borders, that blocks close to borders should be especially short and potential street use extremely fluid, and that mixtures of primary uses should be abundant; so should mixtures in age of buildings

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

I do not think it is an advantage to build planned packaged houses. If you prefabricate a house completely, it becomes an unnecessary restriction.

The architect works for so many years building it, and the moment you deliver it to the people is the moment when you are unnecessary.

If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.

If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.

I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.

We had a lot of difficulty in getting the French to accept the pyramid. They thought we were trying to import a piece of Egypt until I pointed out that their obelisk was also from Egypt and the Place des Pyramides is around the corner. Then they accepted it. The pyramid at the Louvre, though, is just the tip.

Grenfell, the building set on fire with the help of its own face, is a scene of a complex injustice: one that is moral, economic, political, and aesthetic. Not only was the cladding unsafe, it was ugly; not only was it ugly, it was untrue both to the architecture of the building it covered and untrue to its responsibility to human safety.

I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.

It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North - that's our highway - there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I'd be like, that's what my house is going to look like when I get older. I'm going to start making my house look like this.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.