Quotes About Architecture

In September 1929, just as the architects were getting down to work on this unprecedented building program, management set a date that seemed unrealistically early—May 1, 1931. That date gave the architects a year and nine months in which to design the building and to oversee its construction.

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

Since the units were self-supporting, there was no need for thick walls to support the load of the building. As a result, large expanses of windows punctuated by delicate cast-iron columns created a rhythmic balance outside and well-lit spaces inside.

The idea that finally turned the tide for the architects, the notion that made everything fall in place, was to set the elevators in a central core, which would allow the Empire State Building to provide rentable space that was well lit. From that point forward, they were home free—the solutions were at hand.

Elisha Graves Otis had demonstrated an elevator at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that had a safety device that prevented it from falling if the cable broke.3 In the cast-iron Haughwout Building on Broadway at Broome Street, where china and cutlery were sold, Otis installed the first of his passenger safety-elevators

The basic plan of the building was reached in four weeks.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.

I don't design houses with the nuclear family idea because I don't believe in it as a concept.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

I don't want to be romantic, but one of the most important things is to have happy buildings... it's like having a family with a lot of children.

I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

I never talked about architecture with my father, which I regret

[My father] was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather. Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's true, certain characteristics are similar.

Allt detta gjorde kyrkan i mina ögon till någonting helt annorlunda än staden i övrigt: en byggnad som, om man kan uttrycka sig så, var rest i fyra dimensioner - av vilka den fjärde var tiden - genom seklerna sträckande sitt skepp, som från travé till travé, från sidokapell till sidokapell tycktes erövra och överskrida icke endast några meter, utan den ena epoken efter den andra.

Beneath his fine skin the bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent. His head made one think of those old dungeon keeps on which the disused battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been converted into libraries.

all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant,

Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach.

La giornata era bellissima, smaltata e netta. Niente pareva lasciato al caso: punte e spigoli, tetti e antenne, grondaie e comignoli, apici d'abete e cime imbiancate. Come in una tavola fiamminga l'acuto sovrastava qualunque possibile rotondità. E pareva consigliasse di mirare in alto verso il turchese compatto del cielo, senza un sole che potesse sbiadirlo, né un volo d'uccello che potesse macchiarlo.

Design follows drama

My design is organic, I don't control architecture, I grow it

He had a theory going about cities, that the dominant industry of the town filtered into every level of the place, from the architecture to the discourse.

Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.