Quotes About Architecture

A visitor in the seventh century could still see triumphal arches, baths, palaces, theatres, bridges, aqueducts and fountains,

Similar structures were built elsewhere at places like Portchester, Pevensey and Caister-on-Sea,

People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.

Prior to deconfliction of the battlespace, enhancement of mission architecture is derecommended, the CO said.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one shape.

we shall be led as much to the street and the cottage as to the temple and the tower; and shall be more interested in buildings raised by feeling

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

No pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery. It would be well, if in all other matters, we were as ready to put up with what we dislike., for the sake of compliance with established law, as we are in architecture.

Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers.

The Minneapolis City Hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.

most old farmhouses were built like that.

The Embassy Suites in Des Moines was of the architectural style known as 20th Century Hotel Unremarkable, a large beige building apparently designed not to piss anybody off, except maybe the local aesthetes.

The General Motors Building, erected the year before on the trapezoidal block bounded by Broadway and Eighth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, however, was an important commission for them, one that won them a secure place in architectural history.

The Fifth Avenue Association awarded the Empire State Building its gold medal for design, which was "architecturally excellent from top to bottom.

In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers selected the Empire State Building as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in America's history—the only wonder conceived, financed, owned, and managed by private industry.3

A skyscraper is a tall building whose weight is supported by a frame of steel or poured-in-place concrete with steel reinforcements. Unlike the load-bearing walls of a masonry structure, walls do not help support the average skyscraper.

The average skyscraper is likewise supported by a skeleton, of steel. Its skin, or walls, are supported by the frame; they do not support the building. When the wall of a skyscraper is pricked, it leaks air, and unless its skeleton has suffered a seriously deleterious blow, the building does not fall down.

In the opinion of architects such as Harvey Wiley Corbett, skyscrapers were America's great gift to architecture, the first new structural form since the ancient Romans

There are 10 million bricks in the building, 27 miles of main and counterweight rails used for the tracks of the elevators, about 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. The completed building contains 37 million cubic feet. The 210 columns at the base support the entire weight of the building.

During World War I, Paul Starrett formed Starrett & Goss, which built steamships for the government. By the time Starrett Bros. & Eken was formed in 1922, Paul had already built Macy's to the designs of De Lemos & Cordes; Pennsylvania Station and the Main Post Office to the designs of McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore's Biltmore Hotel, where the meeting with the Empire State's directors would decide their fate.

The step from using steel for strengthening masonry to using steel to carry the masonry might not seem enormous, but, as Harvey Wiley Corbett pointed out in The New York Times, Buffington's step was the single most momentous discovery in the history of building since the days of Rome. Architecture was freed from the shackles of stone weight and was made flexible. Buildings

By the 1890s, New York was catching up with Chicago, and true skyscrapers were being erected. The city had the twenty-four-story St. Paul Building on Broadway at Fulton Street, and the twenty-six-story American Surety Building at 100 Broadway (the Bank of Tokyo Building in 1995, and still standing). By the end of the 1890s, New York City had the tallest skyscraper in the world, the now largely ignored Park Row Building at 15 Park Row—a 29-story building