Quotes About Architecture

I got a degree in architecture for the educational experience but in terms of career, everything is cinema.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

I wanted to be an architect, and I ended up at my job in San Francisco, and if you would have asked me then, that was one of the greatest jobs that had happened to me in terms of my career.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

The architect works in the territory of memory.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I

a paradox: architecture can only escape the flatness imposed by drawing through drawing.

Likeness is not identity; orthographic projection is not orthography; drawing is not writing and architecture does not speak.

An architecture devoted to its freezing and display could only be its mausoleum.

Is Ronchamp reminiscent of the Ark left stranded on Ararat, or like 'bits of broken china thrown on top of the hill'? Is the roof like a bird's wing, or does the whole edifice look like a decoy? Is it an alighting dove or a sitting duck? Good taste bids us to suppress the latter in favour of the former, although the latter is as easy to see.

A tower seldom crumbles from the bottom up

It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.

rain obliterated the outlines of the houses

built up on stilts.

Bars over the door, but not the window, and the roof looked

some historians call Sicily "the world's island" because it has been conquered by so many peoples, owing to its location in the middle of the Mediterranean, valuable for trade and military reasons. Sicilians have been influenced by each culture, and the island's amazingly diverse history is reflected in its dramatic architecture, ruggedly beautiful terrain, delicious food, sibilant language, even the faces of its people.

Bailey always lived in cities, where everything was a crush and you were never really alone. He craved the buzz of people and culture, food and energy, architecture.

few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit

Churches are so nice when they're empty. Like empty streets. You can see their shape.

All the estate houses were the same design. Two up and two down. Originally. Little kitchens and bathrooms were added on after the war.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history.