Quotes About Architecture

You wouldn't know an Ionic entablature if it bit you on your portico.

When I started this project, I was a young architect. I was very apprehensive about any changes to the design. Whether I wanted to or not, I learned that you can accept some changes to its form without compromising its intent. But it's a leap of faith that I didn't want to make initially - to put it mildly.

Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it.

The brutal truth is that architecture is too important to be left exclusively to a few people. It's fine to have an architect, but the key way to keep an architecture intact is to make sure that everyone on the team knows what it is and has a stake in it.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

Cairo is one of the greatest storehouses of human achievement on earth, ranging from the pharaonic through the Christian and Islamic periods to the Belle Epoque.

Cairo is an exploding modern metropolis which nevertheless preserves within its heart the finest medieval city in the world...

The common law—government at its basest and least objectionable—is akin in this sense to architecture and fashion. It is the sum total of literally millions of attorneys, clients, lawyers, judges, and politicians making marginal changes over decades. No one mind can deduce it in its totality and simultaneously contain all the infinite threads woven throughout.

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

Chicago rising out of the Midwest like huge metallic cornstalks...

The similarity of architecture in organized, complex systems suggests that they all share universal requirements. They are designed to be "efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust.

When the lessons of symbolic or philosophical mathematics seen in nature, which were designed into religious architecture or art, are applied functionally (not just intellectually) to facilitate the growth and transformation of consciousness, then mathematics may rightly be called "sacred.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Lo que primero llamaba la atención era la ausencia total de muebles, lo cual era posible gracias a la utilización sistemática de pequeñas diferencias de nivel a la altura del suelo. De este modo, las zonas destinadas a dormitorios eran excavaciones rectangulares de cuarenta centímetros de profundidad: uno bajaba a la caba en vez de subirte a ella. Las bañeras eran igualmente grandes pilas redondas cuyo reborde estaba situado a ras de suelo.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don't have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won't end up being any good.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.

I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.

En arquitectura, el que compta és la poesia de l'espai [...].