Quotes About Architecture

Art and architecture were a single unit; only later did they take separate courses. (It is curious that today, with all our wealth, our builders cannot afford the decorative beauty customary in the relatively poor Middle Ages.)

The first datable stone donjon, or keep, was built in France at Langeais, overlooking the Loire, in 994.

Design is not only about imagining an exterior form. It is even more centrally about the internal spatial experience that gives rise to form.

The Sphinx and its contemporary architecture throughout Kamit give us the earliest history, the earliest recorded evidence of the practice of advanced religion anywhere in the world. The Sphinx has now been proven to be the earliest example of the practice of religion in human history, 10,000 BCE.

Marketing selfish dogmas and propaganda is the architecture of modern thinking into which modern theories and hypotheses and other kinds of opinions are placed that grow to the level of dogmas.

Western cathedrals and abbeys…through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

The towers were to be built along the seafront at 600-yard intervals,

Some 60 million Americans live in a rural America that is suffering, and the U.S. political architecture gives the frustrations of these rural Americans disproportionate political influence.

What counted was focus, paring down: the form of the Parthenon as opposed to all the ornament and complexities of wedding-cake architecture.

In addition to Bronson Canyon and Alaska, the company went into deepest Simi Valley, where we filmed the climatic peace conference at a Jewish community center with what we hoped would register as futuristic architecture.

The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism.

So wie es keine Tragödie gibt außer unter Fürsten und unter Götter, so gibt es keine Architektur außer für Götter und für Fürsten. Die moderne Architektur ist ein bürgerliches Melodrama.

This is an old house. Among the oldest in the area, a white clapboard former farmhouse built in 1748. Fart on the porch and it rattles a floor board in the attic. -Dice (Swoon)

The higher the building the lower the morals.

I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

If you weren't an optimist, it would be impossible to be an architect

We marvel why, among the most progressive Western nations, architecture should be so devoid of originality, so replete with repetitions of obsolete styles. Perhaps we are passing through an age of democratisation in art, while awaiting the rise of some princely master who shall establish a new dynasty. Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great because they never drew from the antique.

It is not that we should disregard the creations of the past, but that we should try to assimilate them into our consciousness. Slavish conformity to traditions and formulas fetters the expression of individuality in architecture.

One of my favorite vacation places is Miami, because of the people, the water and the beach - of course - and the architecture on Miami Beach is so wonderful.

People are built like houses inside- they have stairwells, spacious halls, vestibules that are always too weakly lit to count the doors into the rooms, row upon row of apartments, damp chambers, slimy, tiled bathrooms with cast-iron baths, steps with handrails taut as veins, artery-like corridors, joint-like landings, passages, guest rooms, draughty chambers into which a sudden current of warm air flows, closets, twists and turns and cubby-holes, and larders full of forgotten supplies.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.