Quotes About Architecture

Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.

Die Mauern aus Feldsteinen, die Dächer aus gebrannten Ziegeln, von Maurern gemauert, nicht von Architekten entworfen. Sie kannten die Winde – jedes Haus eine Festung gegen die Überfälle des Mistrals –, kannten die barmherzige und die unbarmherzige Sonne, kannten den Regen und kannten jene, für die sie bauten.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive you will be able to design a house together with your family a garden for your children places where you can work beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.

The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.

The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.

Architectural gestures affect us in similar ways to human gestures.

The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.

Your voice sounds as if you don't think much of the nineteenth century." "Right," I said, "I detest it." "You're wrong," he said, "nonsense. Even the architecture wasn't as bad as it's made out to be.

A house of stone and glass and iron should be stark and sober, a watchtower from which a benevolent guard is kept on society. But the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable contact. A notable newspaper critic had described this effect as being that of "a pernicious sensuality." And if that wasn't enough, the entire construction blushed a truly disgraceful peachy-pink at sunset and dawn.

Miri and I conferred and decided that we liked the tallness of the house, the way the walls shoot up and up with the certainty of stone

The first thing he noticed with fascination was the shape of Lenin's "amazing skull"; filled to bursting with erudition and ideas, it "made one think not of anatomy but of architecture.

It's amazing how alike and anonymous all suburbs are, as undistinguishae from one another as highways. Maybe that's why I love cities. There's not a row of houses in London that could possibly be mistaken for New York. There isn't a square block in Manhattan that will ever for a moment remind you of London.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

We are creating a unique experience. It's starts with how you see the building from a distance.

A city building, you experience when you walk a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of human nature; await nothing from pity.

Our souls are full of Gothic arches, pinnacles, twisted traceries we cannot shake off, and of which Greek minds knew nothing.

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.