Quotes About Architecture

You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.

We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

I'm a leftie, and I've always believed in doing things on a modest scale.

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

I wanted to be considered a good craftsman. I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, molded to the curves of the female form, stylizing its shape.

I always thought if I was born 2000 years earlier, I would be a monk, probably carving a monastery or some giant pantheon buildings.

The Taj Mahal is a monument to love in all cultures.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.

I've always really loved the '20s and the whole Art Deco time. I just think it was just the most amazing era for style and design.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after

architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...

During those years of travel I saw that architecture is what we console ourselves with once we've obliterated our natural landscapes.

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

To hear some thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say it, the people of Greece had it all figured out two millennia ago. That's not even remotely true, but what ancient Greece did accomplish in terms of science, architecture, literature, art, and philosophy is certainly enough to explain why so many people have come away with the impression.

New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel.

After New York City, where I lived and which I also loved, with its sharp right angles and hard surfaces and fast tempo and endless pavement and soaring vertical walls, a giant video game of the mind at the expense of the body

but the script he saw written all about him, on the signposts and facades of Alexandria, was musical, all right. It ran complicated scales on the optic nerve. Everywhere, the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as the abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback.

Here is the house.

The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).