Quotes About Architecture

An Organizing System is an abstract characterization of how some collection of resources is described and arranged to enable human or computational agents to interact with the resources. The Organizing System is an architectural and conceptual view that is distinct from the physical arrangement of resources that might embody it, and also distinct from the person, enterprise, or institution that implements and operates it.

Works of architecture were, in that context, embodiments of the ideals on which the life of institutions depended.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Less is a bore.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

Viva the mitten with wriggle room over the glove where form follows function!

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.

What holds us back in life is the invisible architecture of fear. It keeps us in our comfort zones, which are, in truth, the least safe

What holds us back in life is the invisible architecture of fear. It keeps us in our comfort zones, which are, in truth, the least safe places in which to live. Indeed, the greatest risk in life is taking no risks.

An additional indication of economic growth in ancient Greece comes from the major increases in the average size of Greek houses: in the eighth century BC it was 53 square meters; by the sixth century BC it had grown to 122 square meters; and by the fifth century BC it was 325 square meters.54

I shared his love of the countryside and of the old ways of building; I believed, as he did, that the modernist styles of architecture that were desecrating our town were also destroying its social fabric; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that it is always right to conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place. That a priori law of practical reason is also the truth in conservatism.

It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion. If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language.

In the German city-states there emerged thereafter a high culture, in which literature, philosophy, music, art and architecture were all spurred on by the rivalry of local sovereigns and the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Rejecting a simple grid for the capital as tiresome and insipid, he argued that such a pattern made sense only for flat cities. Not only would diagonal streets provide contrast and variety, but they would serve as express lanes, shortening the distance between places. Town squares would be situated where diagonal avenues crossed.

located in El Paseo, a slightly old-world marketplace downtown. Traditional Spanish architecture and winding adobe hallways led to quaint gift shops and jewelry stores. It was old-world meets tourist trap.

Forget the damned motor car and built cities for lovers and friends .

Every city is a ghost. New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.

When the Bennington was built, in 1872, it was said that the architect, who had descended from a long line of witches, fashioned the building on ancient occult principles so that it would always be a sort of magnet for the otherworldly. So as I said, don't pay any mind to the odd sounds or sights you might experience. It's just the Bennington, dear.

Every city is a ghost. New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel beam, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting.

We call this building the Architects' Revenge. The balconies are designed to be too sunny, too windy, and too dirty. The cinders that hurtle through my living room are capable of putting out an eyeball. But it's a good address. Some of the best people live in this building, several of them blind in one eye.

We designed the house to go with her looks.