Quotes About Architecture

Choice architecture in domains from human resource departments to social security to health care must use some combination of curation and navigation tools. If they don't, people will flounder. As we have mentioned, some people have a simple philosophy: Just Maximize Choices. That's not always a bad idea, but it can be problematic without sophisticated choice architecture tools. Instead, a well-curated small selection and/or a good default can produce quite satisfactory outcomes.

The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people's behavior; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives.

One way to start to think about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture: Who uses? Who chooses? Who pays? Who profits?

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates.

Ever since the Renaissance, the Italian engineering mind has always had a special capacity for viewing a project with a fresh and practical artistry. The Italian talent for stripping down to bare essentials the elements of compromise, which is the heart of all creative design, has never been surpassed; and it was desperately needed to break clear from the archaic form of warship architecture that had lingered on for a quarter of a century.

the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.

I hate it when people let me down, when things are temporary. I think that's why I want to be an architect. To build something permanent, I said. A monument to last a thousand years.

Grand buildings made her feel better--maybe because being in a place so permanent made her feel more permanent.

Frank Gehry's office began to recognize the benefits of CAD/CAM and reciprocated in a technology transfer back to architecture, fusing computers with engineering, fabrication, art and architecture.

Juan Bautista de Toledo

Italy Is Made of Tuff Stuff

Acropolis Loop" pedestrian walkway bordering the base of the Acropolis.

Back out in what passed for daylight, he was greeted by ancient, tall tenements staring blankly at each other from either side of the street, making it feel more like a tunnel, making it feel as if night had fallen. If there had been no people around, you might have mistaken it for a film set of a Dickens novel. You might have mistaken it for the past itself.

the bones of the church, its carcass and ribs, like medieval poetry—apse, chancel, nave, transept, clerestory, sacristy, misericord—

I'd been to Chelsea Piers a few times over the years. It's a series of buildings constructed on four adjoining piers where the West 20s meet the Hudson River. Back in the early part of the twentieth century, it had been a thriving part of the riverfront, where some of the great ships docked in between their transatlantic crossings. In fact, according to a sign posted there, the Titanic had been destined to dock at

Lesson learned. To succeed as an architect in this world is to sacrifice vision to reality. The field of architecture pretends to be art, and sometimes a house design that is real and true gets recognition, but in reality, success is more often a business. A little seed of brilliance that had germinated and begun to sprout deep inside Duncan withered and died that afternoon.

I could see similar townhouses on the opposite side of the street. There were six of them in a row, and the front of each had been painted a slightly different colour, to prevent a resident climbing the wrong steps and entering a neighbour's house by mistake.

An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner.

The Cathedral Builders by Jean Gimpel.

Petranilla turned to the girls. "Our father was descended from Tom Builder, the stepfather and mentor of Jack Builder, architect of Kingsbridge Cathedral," she said.

the château was a church said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old churches.

The invention of the pointed arch, he wrote, was a rare event in history, when the solution to a technical problem—how to build a taller church—was also sublimely beautiful.

The responsibility of an architect is to create a sense of order, a sense of place, a sense of relationship.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another.