Quotes About Architecture

Some of my best friends are architects. And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings.

I haven't done any building designs since the Loaf House.

Lucknow is a city of love and I am really desperate to know more of what Lucknow is really about.

Europe is one of the best travel destinations in the world.

I love the book 'Devil in the White City.'

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

I'd like to know about some of the things that they teach down there, like building a lake. If I ever wanted to build a lake, I'd like to know how to do it.

My first architectural project I did, I must have been fifteen, was for neighbors across the street, a couple of school teachers, and I designed a house for them. I didn't know anything about Le Corbusier or anything like that, but it ended up being a very cubistic kind of house. I always wanted to be an architect.

I am immersed in architecture all day, working in my office or teaching.

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.

For architects, towns and cities are just big display cases for their work. The fact that the place matters so much more than the building is something else they don't want to know. Making good cities is the last thing on their mind. As the heroic urbanist Jane Jacobs was heard to say, "the most cunningly ignorant people I know are architects.

Every house is built after a plan of its own: one looks in, another looks out; one is tall, another broad; and they are so irregular in height and outline that they seem as if they were all getting up out of bed at different hours in the morning, some not being yet quite up, while others are yawning and stretching themselves.

If a change to the requirements breaks your architecture, then your architecture sucks.

What if your company has made a commitment to a certain database, or a certain web server, or a certain framework? A good architect pretends that the decision has not been made, and shapes the system such that those decisions can still be deferred or changed for as long as possible. A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

Architecting for the enterprise, when all you really need is a cute little desktop tool, is a recipe for failure.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. —Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

On the other hand, a system being developed by five different teams, each of which includes seven developers, cannot make progress unless the system is divided into well-defined components with reliably stable interfaces. If no other factors are considered, the architecture of that system will likely evolve into five components—one for each team.