Quotes About Design

In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.

You might think about putting some heavy-duty hooks into the ceiling joists and beams so that you can have a rope ladder, or a small swing inside your house.

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

When I moved to Switzerland to study at ETH Zurich I became fascinated by Swiss architecture.

I was a civil engineer in Sydney, I liked to re-do old houses.

My commitment is that Crown Sydney won't be just another hotel: it will be a landmark building for Sydney with a design and quality that the city deserves.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.

Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

I believe buildings are alive, and when you want to make a change, you have to change in the same symphony.

I never did calligraphy... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism... It's part of that asceticism.

Startups are now creating specialized 3-D printers capable of producing everything from synthetic hamburgers to multi-story apartment buildings.

There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.

Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there's a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration.

Historical costumes from the 18th and 19th centuries look so complicated, but when you see the patterns, it's very systematic. I've always been impressed by how the patterns economize the fabric.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

Clearly the world wasn't as natural as we had always assumed. Someone or something had designed it, a joker perhaps, or if geology really was responsible, then blind physical forces had no less a sense of humour than the gods, which is not implausible.

We typed 'Boobs'.

cyan, magenta, yellow and black