Quotes About Architecture

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.

The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labour. It is in the detailed architecture of some of the city's oldest buildings, sculpted by enslaved hands. It is in the roads, first paved by enslaved people.

[On an architectural design by Santiago Calatrava:] A city is never more fully human than when expertise—our own or someone else's—allows us access to ebullience, lightness and delight.

Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

She does not want symmetry. She wants nooks and crannies and funny little alcoves and unexpected passages leading to rooms that don't make sense.

If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational.

Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

My home is in West Vancouver, B.C. My husband built it from drawings to design and colour.

Unesco can rightly be claimed as one of Britain's greatest contributions to that global architecture of peace, and for Penny Mordaunt to be willing to destroy that legacy by withdrawing Britain's membership is nothing but historical and cultural vandalism.

During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.

We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of 'the use.' Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty.

One of the general considerations about new buildings is that people tend to say that anything new is a monstrosity. And then after a while they either accept them or they go on thinking that they are monstrosities. Reactions vary. This depends to some extent on the quality of the building.

We live in a complicated, oppressive world with enormous cities and vast populations, and I try to contribute by making it more light and open and calm.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.

The Vatican takes your breath away.

I've been to the Vatican more than anyplace else outside this country in the world. I am mesmerized by it.

Vatican City is a bit overrated in my opinion - no offence to the Vatican.

A lot of places in Las Vegas are big boxes of stuff. The hotels I've built have had, for lack of a better term, a soul.