Quotes on Architecture

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

Author: Alvar Aalto

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

Author: Mukesh Ambani

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Author: Laurie Anderson

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

Author: Philip Anderson

The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.

Author: Tadao Ando

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Author: Tadao Ando

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

Author: Tadao Ando

I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.

Author: Tadao Ando

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Author: Tadao Ando

One of my favorite vacation places is Miami, because of the people, the water and the beach - of course - and the architecture on Miami Beach is so wonderful.

Author: Oksana Baiul

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

Author: John Baldacci

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

Author: Luis Barragan

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

Author: Luis Barragan

Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.

Author: Luis Barragan

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

Author: William Bennett

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Author: Constantin Brancusi

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Author: Samuel Butler

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Author: David Byrne

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

Author: Lord Byron

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

Author: Hugo Chavez

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Author: Jay Chiat

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

Author: Jay Chiat

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Author: Kenneth Clark

The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.

Author: Joel Coen

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

Author: Le Corbusier

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Author: Le Corbusier

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Author: Salvador Dali

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.

Author: Catherine Deneuve

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

Author: William Devane

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

Author: Ernest Dimnet

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Author: Charles Eames

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

Author: Arthur Erickson

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Author: Arthur Erickson

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?

Author: Arthur Erickson

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

Author: Arthur Erickson

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

Author: Arthur Erickson

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

Author: Arthur Erickson

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

Author: Arthur Erickson

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Author: Arthur Erickson

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

Author: Arthur Erickson

The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.

Author: Ralph Erskine

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.

Author: Ian Finlay

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Author: Milton Friedman

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.

Author: Art Garfunkel

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Author: Frank Gehry

I call architecture frozen music.

Author: Johann Goethe

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

Author: Juan Goytisolo

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

Author: Michael Graves

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

Author: Michael Graves

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Author: Michael Graves

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

Author: Michael Graves

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

Author: Michael Graves

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Author: Walter Gropius

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

Author: Marilyn Hacker

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Charles was very intent to use his years as Prince of Wales to make his mark while he still had freedom of maneuver that he wouldn't have as King. The first subject he really went for was architecture. It made an impact.

Author: Anthony Holden

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Author: Victor Hugo

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

Author: John Irving

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Author: Bruce Jackson

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

Author: Arne Jacobsen

I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.

Author: Arne Jacobsen

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.

Author: Arne Jacobsen

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

Author: Arne Jacobsen

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

Author: Arne Jacobsen

I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away.

Author: Helmut Jahn

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Author: Helmut Jahn

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

Author: Helmut Jahn

The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.

Author: Helmut Jahn

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Author: Philip Johnson

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

Author: Philip Johnson

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

Author: Louis Kahn

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Author: Louis Kahn

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

Author: Louis Kahn

Architecture is politics.

Author: Mitchell Kapor

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

Author: Rem Koolhaas

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Author: Rem Koolhaas

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.

Author: Rem Koolhaas

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

Author: Rem Koolhaas

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up.

Author: George Lamming

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

Author: T. Lawrence

What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?

Author: Bernard Levin

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Author: Daniel Libeskind

Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built.

Author: Daniel Libeskind

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Author: Daniel Libeskind

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.

Author: Maya Lin

Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

Author: Maya Lin

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

Author: Maya Lin

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

Author: Maya Lin

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

Author: Maya Lin

I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

Author: Maya Lin

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

Author: Adolf Loos

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Author: Adolf Loos

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

Author: Federico Lorca

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Author: Audre Lorde

There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

Author: Edwin Lutyens

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

Author: Russell Lynes

I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year.

Author: Barry Mann

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Author: Steve Martin

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Author: Thom Mayne

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Author: Thom Mayne

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Author: Thom Mayne

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

Author: Thom Mayne

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Author: Thom Mayne

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

Author: Richard Meier

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

Author: Richard Meier

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

Author: Julia Morgan

People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.

Author: Marc Newson

You can just drift unhappily towards this vision of heaven on earth, and ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of: Heaven on earth, at it's best.

Author: Ben Nicholson

If you're into architecture and you're from the West, everything is hors d'oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you're led there. You can't escape it.

Author: Ben Nicholson

At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I'm not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.

Author: Ben Nicholson

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

Author: Jean Nouvel

Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.

Author: Robert Palmer

Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.

Author: Marcus Pollio

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

Author: Thomas Reid

In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.

Author: Alain Robert

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.

Author: Richard Rogers

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Author: Ludwig Rohe

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Author: Ludwig Rohe

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

Author: John Ruskin

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

Author: John Ruskin

Architecture in general is frozen music.

Author: Friedrich Schelling

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements.

Author: Tony Scott

After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

Author: Harry Seidler

After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

Author: Harry Seidler

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

Author: Harry Seidler

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Author: Herbert Simon

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Author: Goldwin Smith

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

Author: Goldwin Smith

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Author: Nancy Smith

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Author: Robert Smithson

But after the time there I'd had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn't last very long.

Author: Stephen Sprouse

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

Author: Frank Stella

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

Author: Parker Stevenson

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

Author: Parker Stevenson

I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I'd done theatricals in college, but I'd done them because it was fun.

Author: James Stewart

First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture.

Author: Gustav Stickley

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.

Author: Kenzo Tange

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

Author: Kenzo Tange