Quotes About Architecture

Before Starrett Bros. & Eken could start work on what would be the world's tallest building, they had to tear down what had been the city's largest hotel, and everyone agreed it would be no easy task.

Shreve and Lamb both joined the firm of Carrère & Hastings.

With his partner gone, Hastings lost his momentum. In 1920, he retired as an active member of the firm.1 The beneficiaries were Shreve and Lamb.

As the building climbed, cafeterias were built to keep up with the height, until there were finally five floors with cafeterias—the third, ninth, twenty-fourth, forty-seventh, and sixty-fourth.

Born in Chicago, Harmon studied at the Art Institute and graduated in 1901 from Columbia University's School of Architecture

he then ran his own firm from 1913 to 1929, during which time he designed the award-winning Shelton Hotel. Often identified with the Empire State Building, Harmon was sometimes a little embarrassed by the honor. He joined Shreve and Lamb in 1929 when they were already roughing out the building's plans, and

Architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon "endowed it with such clean beauty, such purity of line, such subtle uses of material, that we believe it will be studied by many generations of architects, a hazardous prophecy in these days of change.

They will never again build like this, he thought. Dignity is an anachronism.

Sunset Towers faced east and had no towers.

All the buildings lining rue de Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

Style is the mind's architecture.

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.

His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design.

The wall is an architectural striptease.

I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year.

There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.

Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.

Forms in nature are a byproduct of a reciprocal action between a given material and the conditions of the environment. But in architecture, the process is the direct opposite: First you decide on the form, and then you think how to build it in reality.

It gives me the creeps when I see a frame for a building going up and recognise the architect. You shouldn't know who a project is by.

Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts.

Well-building hat three conditions. Commodity, firmness, and delight.

New Haven is really cool.