Quotes About Architecture

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?

Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

Architects create spaces that accommodate human activity.

Our job is to get people in, create the spaces, and then get out of the way.

In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.

Apart from differentiating our spaces with design, we also look for buildings that have distinctive character. We make sure every seat is a good one.

Spaghetti Junction is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at night.

The reality is that throughout my career I've tackled projects in Spain that I'm proud of.

Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage. Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.

Change for the sake of change, as we see in architecture, food, and lifestyle, is frequently the opposite of progress.

It is a country where they know how to build houses. A man's wish to be snug in his own little house, which is just for him and his family, and to have a garden which he cultivates himself, is considered quite reasonable, and so the cities are made up of just such little houses.

cities are built to kill people

The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.

Whereas art critics are ready to accept-indeed are looking for-the new fabrication of a consistent visual language, architectural critics, like the general public, are much more conservative and unwilling to accept the introduction of new codes.

the philosopher Karl Popper and his ally Ernst Gombrich, wrote many critiques of the zeitgeist and argued that although there is no such thing as historical inevitability, there most certainly is a 'logic of the situation and climate of opinion', and morality consists in resisting those pressures when they are socially negative. In architecture this syndrome became the alliance of mass production with mass urban renewal, cheap housing and overcrowding.

Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it's better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.

the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.

Buildings are always better than drawings and models.

London is a modern Babylon.

I do really modern with materials that are so luxurious that they're, like, baroque.

I'm really a fighter against modernism equaling brutalism.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.