Quotes About Architecture

La Paz, Bolivia, is the most extraordinary city.

There are three floors beneath the garage? Why on earth?" -Mac

We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It's like hunger and thirst — you need them both.

I really can't believe what a state the Pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they are just giant boulders balanced on top of each other, like a massive game of Jenga that has got out of hand.

Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.

By the eighth and ninth centuries, mistrusted by the Christians and neglected by the Germanic conquerors, the baths in the West had fallen into disrepair and were finally abandoned. Extraordinary achievements in engineering, architecture, public health and city planning that stretched from Italy to Britain to North Africa, they mostly lay in ruins for centuries.

In 1829, when Boston's Tremont House opened its Greek Revival doors, the hotel world changed forever. Its innovations included individual patent locks on each of the 170 rooms, French cooking, gaslight in the public rooms and a substantial chunk

cabins and clapboard houses

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall.

Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land—the one true mark of stable grandeur—was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.

The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.

The first thing he noticed was that Las Vegas seemed to have invented a new school of functional architecture, 'The Gilded Mousetrap School' he thought it might be called, whose main purpose was to channel the customer-mouse into the central gambling trap whether he wanted the cheese or not.

The decorator of Las Colimas must have been a great admirer of both early Aztec and late Taco Bell architectural styles.

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around.

Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education.

Once I tried to make a standardization of staircases. Probably that is one of the oldest of the standardizations. Of course, we design new staircase steps every day in connection with all our houses, but a standardized step depends on the height of the buildings and on all kinds of things.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.

The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

I live in a craftsman house, but I'm a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.