Quotes About Architecture

Instead of making grand structures and beautiful buildings, we should focus on the environment and the urban space and how you encourage people to live.

I've never looked at a suburban building as being a minor building and an urban building as being a major building.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?

The expiatory church of La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract

What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

It is not possible to design always the same. How to be different in each different place - that is the most important work and duty of the architect to find out.

Architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. Creative work is expressed in our time as a union of technology and humanity.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

I was impressed by the Taj Mahal. A good bit of work, well looked after, worth paying money to see.

A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

Most architects work in ­studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and ­historical ­research were irrelevant.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

If there really is no new way to be found, we are not afraid to stick with the old one that we found previously. So, I do not make every building different.