Quotes About Architecture

'The Devil in the White City' - the 'White City' was the nickname for the World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.

What's fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it's crap-looking - apart from the White House, which is beautiful.

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I'd done theatricals in college, but I'd done them because it was fun.

I taught at Princeton for 39 years, and the school of architecture on the campus is the worst building on the campus.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Buildings designed exclusively on scientific principles will depress their occupants and constrain their creativity.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.

Even the picturesque prehistoric settlements at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini were an exercise in problem-solving; white-washed homes and town halls built with an anti-earthquake technology still employed today, 3,500 years on.

I got addicted to the hands-on problem-solving through the process of making or designing something. Architecture school was really influential and amazing.

Architecture is by definition a very collaborative process.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

Because, if we understand how a building is to be produced and we find a way that it can be more simply produced, then obviously we are contributing to building better buildings more easily.

I've never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.

I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.

Seeing architecture differently from the way you see the rest of life is a bit weird. I believe one should be consistent in all that one does, from the books you read to the way you bring up your children. Everything you do is connected.

In writing 'The Humans,' I obsessed over the financial district and the architecture.

I want to explore my design philosophy in different mediums, and I'm very interested in architecture.

I was in school for architecture and when you're in school for a creative discipline, so much of what you produce comes out of inspiration from other people. The more you're exposed to architecturally, the better you can develop your own language out of that history of architectural thought.