Quotes About Architecture

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

Martha Stewart has two houses in East Hampton. She has an old fashioned Victorian house and a very new modern house.

Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly.

Stonehenge was built possibly by the Minoans. It presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.

Yet in the city I was discovering, the collage of fantasy, pigment, quotation, and architecture that I walked through daily in my outfits and my obsessions, I came to notice small-scale transpositions, tiny openings within the texture of the present, where choices towards a freed thinking could be possible.

as though the architect had tried to please everyone via the dubious method of insane and haphazard compromise.

In big fourteenth-century houses the kitchen was sometimes in a separate building, to lessen the risk of fire. Otherwise it might be next to the main dining hall, on the first floor. Its windows were unlikely to be glazed. The wooden shutters and louvres kept the worst of the winter weather out and let out some of the smoke, but hardly helped with the light level. When daylight faded, candlelight and firelight had to suffice.

The architect Built his great heart into these sculptured stones, And with him toiled his children, and their lives Were builded, with his own, into the walls, As offerings unto God.

It's one of those ultramodern, "architecturally designed" affairs—all windows, some concrete and metal. It rises like an angular, shimmering phoenix from the ruins of what was probably once a characterful home—something unique but not quite old enough to claim protective heritage status.

He had to give humans credit where it was due - they did seem to have a knack for building interesting places for cats to explore.

In my judgment, my buildings are considerably less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan.

Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It's a den of crime and corruption. And it's a monument to architecture and enterprise. It's violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they're all here. The

that underlay the city of Chicago.

The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall.

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.

So I was shampooing at 14. But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America's most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better?

I work the terraces, Miss Jones. I bring forth the champagne and the wine. I ensure that the chateau remains a perfect example of French architecture. I pay the wages of the workers. I give the orders and flourish the phantom whip, but I am only the caretaker of Satancourt and its cellar.

I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings

Firmitas, utilitas, venustas.