Quotes about architecture

We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

Modern architecture predominately specializes in designing what are essentially dimly lit caves.

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside.

And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorr

How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its altering realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision, has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogeneous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of b

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt;

Thus nature provides a system for proportioning the growth of plants that satisfies the three canons of architecture. All modules are isotropic and they are related to the whole structure of the plant through self-similar spirals proportioned by the golden mean.

We therefore find that the triangles and rectangles herein described, enclose a large majority of the temples and cathedrals of the Greek and Gothic masters, for we have seen that the rectangle of the Egyptian triangle is a perfect generative medium, its ratio of five in width to eight in length 'encouraging impressions of contrast between horizontal and vertical lines' or spaces; and the same practically may be said of the Pythagorean triangle

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the earth, I see —— architects and earthquakes - empaths and robots - fictions and near misses - lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming.I see us - trying on ways of being - so sweet and messy, so worthwhile.

Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature.

Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.

Great artists need great clients.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.

Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped.

We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us

You are my other self

Like a spider in its web, a vibration anywhereis felt everywhere.

SEE what you think.

We shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.

Life did not take over the world by combat,but by networking.

Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.(b) “Objective” work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This

We will feel conviction about the things we create only if we keep discovering, within those creations, new reasons for wanting them to be that way.

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.

Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as moments of life 'concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a play of events' -- but that also necessary entailed the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art, the abolition of politics,

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!The ruler struck the glass over the picture.- Look,- said Roark

Sometimes the things that destroy you, become the architectural blueprints which make your mind royal.

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar

Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us.

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her h

I don't know who you are," she thought, "but whoever you are, you're one hell of a player.

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls.

Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Even a brick wants to be something.A brick wants to be something.It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is.It wants to be something better than it is.

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else.""Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible, I shall avoid the expression of any opinion as to the objective truth or falsehood of the systems of theological speculation of which I may find occasion to speak. From my present point of view, theology is regarded as a

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

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

In the architecture of their life some may display Potemkin happiness in view of hiding the dark features of their fair weather relationship, preferring to set up a window dressing of fake satisfaction rather than being rejected as emotional outcasts. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")

We are what we build

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

spaces that at first may appear to reflect a simple condition are much more complex when the actions of individuals and groups are factored in. These unique patterns of movement through space can and should guide the architecture we build to serve them. For space only becomes truly public when people recognize it and utilize it as such. Great public space cannot be built as much as curated; it is architecture's responsibility to craft space in response to specific needs and unique practices. . .

History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves

The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky.

We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

For me, it does not 'miss' if (the Potteries Thinkbelt study) goes into the archive, not as an example of how railway carriages can be used for teaching, but as one of the most powerful question marks ever placed against the architecture of university education.

(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ...project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion.

Beautiful building,” Phoebe said. Sam nodded. “Classical Revival,” he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have learned about building styles and understand what Classical Revival meant. They could have intelligent discussions about things like rooflines and columns.

Simple is complicated.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see i

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place -

Architecture is a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time.

Why can't we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical straight unbending only at right angles - and functional?

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe - when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.

In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

The materials of city planning are sky space trees steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.

Buildings should be good neighbours.

Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

Life is rich always changing always challenging and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood concrete glass and steel of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

A building is a string of events belonging together.

Good architecture is like a piece of beautifully composed music crystallized in space that elevates our spirits beyond the limitation of time.

Architecture (is) a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing.

I saw the bathroom fixtures as a kind of American Trinity.

Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains ask yourself the question: Not what style but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity vulgarity anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

Light God's eldest daughter is a principal beauty in a building.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

The flowering of geometry.

Society needs a good image of itself. That is the job of the architect.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

An arch never sleeps.