Quotes About Architecture

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

The Vitruvian Man sprang from the same passion. Leonardo borrowed the Roman architect Vitruvius's belief that the parts of the human body all exist in exact proportion to one another, in order to construct a visual allegory of man's place in the cosmos.

As for Chartres's famous flying buttresses, the first ever constructed, they were built to relieve stress on the cathedral's walls, so that windows could be available for yards and yards of glittering stained glass.

Just as a picture should provide the spectator with a new view of his world, so should a building.

This meant various things, but two stand out. First, obviously, was that a church or a temple should look like a church or a temple, a house like a house, and not vice versa. But the Adam brothers would also assert that an architectural style must be flexible enough to compose and decorate any type of building. Therefore any building could be made to be beautiful, not only a town house or a commercial building, but even a warehouse—or a factory.

In a purely technical sense, Sens Cathedral is probably the first Gothic church. When Abelard and Bernard met there in the spring of 1140, they probably did not notice that an architectural revolution was taking place over their heads. Its builders pioneered many of the characteristic elements of the Gothic style, from ribbed interior vaults and a three-part elevation, to the famous pointed Gothic arch for its windows.

In truth, a good master mason could build an entire Gothic cathedral with just a compass and a T square, a device he borrowed from Greek mathematicians for lining up perfect vertical and horizontal lines. This dazzling command of practical geometry made the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages truly independent businessmen. By the fourteenth century, they were already calling themselves free masons.

Indeed, the bold, almost primitive, architecture of the CN Tower may reveal a basic truth about Canadian political existence as a perfect ideological symbol of the "technological nationalism" which has always been the essence of the Canadian state, and, most certainly, the locus of the Canadian identity.

I long for Europe of the ancient parapets.

fue Almanzor quien acabó de construir la mezquita de Córdoba;

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

Her way with the chaos in her mind was to cultivate it through the articulations of others, by which she meant the reading of a lifetime with whose aid she created the interesting architecture and geography of herself.

Architecture is a discourse; everything is a discourse. Fashion discourse is actually a micro-discourse, because it's centered around the body. It is the most rapidly developing form of discourse.

Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.

I've always loved three-sided patios. Courtyard plans are very common, but it's rare that it has one side open.

The question that I can't shake - it's this question that keeps coming up for me - is What does the shared home of the future look like? People are sharing homes at a rate that no one ever predicted, but residences and homes weren't designed for it. They were designed around ideas of privacy and separation.

When you are only one vendor, there is a very low rate of innovation. You think the old architecture is just fine, and it can just happily exist for many years.

The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.

For me, one of my personal inspirations was designers in the mid-20th century named Charles and Ray Eames.

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.

Theatre is real-time - you get that real-time audience reaction, which is fantastic. And with art pieces, people don't ever have to explain themselves. You can do something and really follow a research. With architecture, you have to be much more public. You have to build consensus. You have to work within the law. There are more complexities.