Quotes About Architecture

I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

The architect who first inspired me to follow this profession was Sir John Soane and his Regency home; well, his three homes, now a museum. The place is like an encyclopedia of paintings, antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and drawings.

Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

We made drawings the size of a whole quarter of a room ceiling, which we would then send on to the model makers. I did this every day for two years. Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed.

Rather than trying to fit a prescribed need for office sizes, we try to go with the flow of the building as much as possible.

We literally see things so differently, all the architecture and stuff. That's the cool part about skateboarding. We're out there skating stuff that's not meant to be skated.

Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

I was always doodling house sketches.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture.

I love being in Chicago.

I always love China, especially the old China.

It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It's just a thought. I

It was like being in the midst of an ugly-building competition. For the better part of a decade architects had been arriving in the area and saying, "You think that's bad? Wait'll you see what I can do!

Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects.

Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.

Norfolk is full of medieval churches—it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world

a modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose.

The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absentminded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed. People in the distant past were not in fact all that small. Doors were small for the same reason windows were small: they were expensive.