Quotes About Architecture

Japanese ideas about religion, architecture, theater, and literature are based on wa and shunyata—concepts of plentitude and uncertainty, of togetherness framed by impermanence.

Each of the arts has its own particular leprosy, its mortal ignominy that eats its face away. Painting has the family group, music the ballad, literature the criticism, and architecture the architect.

Érection. Ne se dit qu'en parlant des monuments.

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect — designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There

Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.

When I was 16 and on a tour of Europe, I fell in love with Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. I'd quite like to live in it.

In this tour around the world I was not interested in contemporary buildings because I had seen contemporary buildings actually until they came out of my ears in a sense.

I remember touring the Medici palace in Florence when I was younger and I was entranced by the beauty and elegance of every space.

Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist.

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements - whether it's the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

In Porto, it's a tourist city. It's close to the river, the ocean as well. There's a lot of history.

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.

The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. They're monumental. They're straight out of Page 52 in your school history book.

I've always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that.

Tower Bridge would make a cool house. I like the idea of living over the river.