Quotes About Architecture

The cathedral, at its noblest, is the best outward symbol of the spiritual nature of man, as it is also the most suggestive measure and prophecy of the corporate life of man.

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

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.

Driving through Dresden, I still remember the many palaces, happily decorated with cherubs and other symbols of the baroque era. The city made an indelible impression on me.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

I believe buildings are alive, and when you want to make a change, you have to change in the same symphony.

Birmingham did a truly remarkable thing in building Symphony Hall, which is the finest concert hall in the U.K. and one of the best in the world. The city has supported music without putting on the brakes.

There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.

Like architecture, all paraphernalia of warfare are PC objects: the most rational possible instruments at the service of the most irrational possible pursuit.

You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

Proud world, said I, cease your contest,And let the mighty babe alone.The phoenix builds the phoenix' nest.Love's architecture is his own.The babe whose birth embraves this morn,Made his own bed ere he was born.

people's choices are pervasively influenced by the design elements selected by choice architects.

It is usually good to provide people with lots of options, but when the question is complicated, sensible choice architecture guides people in the right directions.