Quotes About Architecture

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I'd move in and sell the previous one - so on and so forth.

Nine out of nine architects start with a sketch, and then they say, 'What should we make it out of?' I start from the bottom up - what should it be made out of - and then I worry about what should it look like. The material, the color of the material, the way it feels, and the way you respond to it is every bit as valid as the form or the shape.

My house is actually two houses that were deconstructed. They were Connecticut Valley houses built in 1771 and 1781. I took them down piece by piece and reconstructed them about 50 miles to the west on the New York/Connecticut border.

The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile of the meeting-house.

I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

Çepeçevre, binalar?n füme camdan cepheleri insan yüzlerine benziyorlar. DonuklaÅŸm?? yüzler bunlar. Sanki içeride hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi, sanki yüzlerin gerisinde hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi. Gerçekten de kimse yok. Ä°ÅŸte, ideal kent dedjÄŸin böyle olur.

Before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and tests the ground to see if it can support the weight; in the same way the wise legislator doesn't start by laying down his good laws but by investigating whether the populace they are intended for is in a condition to receive them.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that.

I work from the inside out.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

My younger brother is an architect, my son and his wife are both architects, they work for me, and so I guess I've started a dynasty.

The Capitol is the best work I have ever done, or shall ever do, and I am glad to have Given it to St. Paul.

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.