Quotes About Architecture

Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.

To me... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting.

In northern architecture - the cathedrals of Europe and all the little churches - the details, the carving of stone, become necessary because the light is not there to help you very much. You have to enrich surfaces. The desert reduces form to its simplest nature. There is no need for gargoyles or flying buttresses in the desert.

Without stones there is no arch.

I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

I hope that America as a whole, and especially its architects, will become more seriously involved in producing a new architectural culture that would bring the nation to the apex - where it has stood before - and lead the world.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

I got a New York designer to build my dream store here, which is a little bit of Florence in New York. It's like the Duomo on Madison. I got inspired by Santa Maria Novella and all the Renaissance architecture.

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.

The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.

The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can't see each other.

didn't keep all the files in one place like existing online music sites. Instead they stored them on the hard drives of millions of users across the Internet. Andy Oram, one of the editors at my publishing company, made the point to me that the architectural implications of these programs were more important than their business implications. (This is a history that has repeated itself fifteen years later with bitcoin and the blockchain.)

What is that?" "It's a gazebo." Calred sounded amused. "Why would you want a structure like that? It's completely indefensible." "That's true. I can't think of a single time in history a gazebo withstood a siege.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

Toutefois, l'architecture musulmane connaît également un plan concentrique, celui du mausolée recouvert d'une coupole. Le prototype de ce plan se retrouve aussi bien dans l'art byzantin comme dans l'art asiatique, où il symbolise l'union du ciel et de la terre, le soubassement recangulaire correspondant à la terre et la coupole sphérique au ciel.

In reality, the apparent 'objectivity' of modern architecture is merely a mysticism in reverse, a congealed sentimentality disguised as objectivity; moreover one has seen often enough just how quickly this attitude is converted, in its protagonists, into the most changeable and arbitrary of subjectivisms.

Otro ejemplo de esta atención al detalle es la forma en que se construyó el castillo. Las piedras en la base son mayores que las que están cerca del tejado. Eso hace que el castillo parezca más grande, pero sin hacerlo demasiado imponente.

The 'Scowcroft Model' recognizes - and embraces - the unique but necessarily modest place the National Security Council and the national security adviser occupy in the American national security architecture.

Beauty is not generic, bland, and clinical. It isn't all things to all people. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in its endlessly intricate detail was beautiful. Modern office buildings are not.

A building is hard to judge. It takes many years to find out whether it works. It's not as simple as asking the people in the office whether they like it.

The audiences are really great. I really love it over there. I love Europe, period. Oh my God, all the architecture and all the history and just to the way people think and live is so different.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.