Quotes About Architecture

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read books and stories by bood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said about his field, Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Yale and Princeton would bite their ivy-covered knuckles in jealousy over the red and gold bricks; tree-lined paths; sculptures; twee, twisting pathways; and Gothic spires.

As one stands before its southern façade, one is stricken with the realization that the stringcourses, repeated with deliberate and gracious monotony from the third to the eighteenth story, these long, straight, horizontal lines are the moderating, leveling principle, the lines of equality.

Look," said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. "Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don't give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture—or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?

An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design.

Why did you decide to be an architect?" "I didn't know it then. But it's because I've never believed in God.

I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a "unit.")

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?

Wynand asked: "Howard, have you ever been in love?" Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly: "I still am." "But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?" "Much greater, Gail.

I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper,' he said. 'It makes him no bigger than an ant - isn't that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It's man who made it - the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man.

Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it? What? Roark asked, incredulously. Fanatical and selfless! Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbowed moved, pressing them to his body. He said That was the most selfish thing you've ever seen a man do.

Roark walked now to these drawings; they were the first things to be packed.

He slipped the sketch to the bottom of the pile. "Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction. All else is nonsense.

Architects are servants, not leaders. They are not to assert their little egos, but to express the soul of their country and the rhythm of their time. They are not to follow the delusions of their personal fancy, but to seek the common denominator, which will bring their work close to the heart of the masses. Architects -ah, my friends, theirs is not to reason why. Theirs is not to command, but to be commanded.

He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no one man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or elsewhere, for that matter.

Have you always liked being Howard Roark?" Roark smiled. The smile was amused, astonished, involuntarily contemptuous.

Escribía que la arquitectura era verdaderamente la mayor de todas las artes, porque era anónima como toda grandeza. Decía que, tal como debía ser, el mundo tenía muchos edificios famosos, pero pocos arquitectos renombrados, puesto que en realidad ningún hombre individual había creado nunca nada de importancia, en arquitectura ni en cualquier otra disciplina.

Robert Adam was the great architect of the eighteenth century, Emma. He built many grand and beautiful

houses for the gentry that are wondrous to behold.

In some ways, the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory.

Una máxima de los arquitectos dice que «la forma sigue a la función». De modo análogo, la administración sigue al liderazgo. El modo en que uno pasa el tiempo es la consecuencia del modo en que uno ve su propio tiempo y sus propias prioridades