Quotes About Architecture

Incorporated into many of the façades are parts of the original structure – stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it.

Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt's houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.

Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.

Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest—I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People—but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side).

Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway.

In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England)

Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak.

Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia

Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bat, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies--the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

At a mixer at the Art and Architecture School, I met Ray Connors. He had small, worried eyes and fine, babyish hair, already receding. His back was hurting him; two years ago he had fallen down an elevator shaft. He was graduating from the Architecture School in January. He went off to get me a glass of wine; by the time he came back, I had practically forgotten his existence.

and at that point the church quietly articulated these words, which tell us something of the secret of old buildings: 'The worse I am threatened, the lovelier I become.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden.

By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh's great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.

A child of the new age of iron, steam, and mechanical wonders, the architect, Isaiah Rogers, virtually invented the modern hotel: a functionally complex and self-contained structure (and social organization) that was a sort of human terrarium. A closed world designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of welcoming, housing, maintaining, and feeding guests in advanced comfort, the hotel was no longer just a stop along the way: it was a destination in itself

The first order of business is to get all stakeholders to agree on a common vision. The vision must drive everything, from architecture to commitments.

We are always looking ahead to anticipate what next, and our unique innovation architecture enables us to take an innovation-led approach to help our clients invent the future.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Iran is amazing. It's beautiful. It has everything, everything you want.

I'm in love with corrugated iron buildings, especially chapels and churches.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.