Quotes About Architecture

We want our buildings to work like a machine that will create a pleasurable environment.

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.

Chicago is a city built on architecture, and there are plenty of buildings to scale.

I am an architect at heart. I designed every home I've ever had, plus my studio.

One of the things I think about as I've evolved as an architect is, 'Where do the poetic impulses come from?'

I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.

There's something very special about seeing history so clearly in front of you through that architecture that you just don't get in the U.S. If I was asked to choose where I'd most like to live, I would always choose London.

To me, the fashion and architecture I like are very closely linked. Both should be clean and simple and without embellishment.

Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.

I love the colorful buildings in Jaipur.

All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.

We know the number of conference rooms and phone booths that make a building successful.

I have always tried to create bridges that are more than a connecting structure - places in their own right.

Something like 'Abstract' can really give people access to the behind-the-scenes of how our physical surroundings take shape.

Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.

I'm suspicious of the idea of architects acting like business executives, brand managers, or purveyors of luxury goods.

I don't like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don't appear any different from those in the past.

The Green Climate Fund is very much a strategic building block in the architecture for financing sustainable development.

I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

I have built already seven very large railway stations: one in Italy; two in Belgium; and in France, and in Switzerland, in Portugal, and also in the United States. And what happens is that stations are not things that come from one day to another, it takes many years.

When I moved to Switzerland to study at ETH Zurich I became fascinated by Swiss architecture.

In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.

I was a civil engineer in Sydney, I liked to re-do old houses.