Quotes About Architecture

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

I come from a long line of architects. I'm the only one who did not become an architect, but I've been around the drawing aspect and construction my whole life.

Since I was a kid, I liked construction.

I never thought I was going to be an architect in the conventional sense.

I'm trying to create architecture as landscape. But I'm not copying nature.

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

A Mediterranean city is really my culture.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology.

When you go to a normal architecture firm they aren't going to be innovative in terms of their systems. They're not going to be thinking of the whole lifespan of this project, or how do we document every single light bulb, or every product, so that when a chair breaks in a conference room, we can replace it right away.

I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people.

The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.

We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem. But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture.

Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.

When I was 15, we settled in Santa Monica, in a beige suburban ranch house. By then, my father, Ray, was an architect at Welton Becket's firm. He was handy with a pencil and pen. His figurative drawings were very good, and his talent was intimidating.

In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That's what today's architecture community should be.

I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you're talking about building a house, you're talking about dreams.

I'm fascinated with design. I realized early that I had no talent in that direction, but I love talking with architects and designers about what they do. I appreciate applied creativity as a source of pleasure and meaning.

The truth is I don't really know where my own interest in tall buildings really comes from. It cannot come from my hometown because there were no tall buildings there!

The problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man.

I needed to understand the spirit of a tall building, what makes it important, what should I try to achieve in a tall building. It became a very interesting problem, something that I like very much.