Architecture Design Quotes

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man. ~ Michelangelo

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind. ~ James Rouse

I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing. ~ Tadao Ando

Minimalism is not defined by what is not there but by the rightness of what is
and the richness with which this is experienced. ~ John Pawson

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

Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it. ~ Jeanne Gang

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again. ~ Renzo Piano

The geometry reveals five development direction for applications (each with endless possibilities); dividing, dwelling, trestle, fenestration and artistic installation. I find these enabled designs so reflective of an ever-changing world where contextual factors and technological resources are shifting definitions of architecture, design, and the traditional boundaries between disciplines. ~ Dror Benshetrit

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole. ~ Maya Lin

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good. ~ Mies Van De Rohe

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 ~ Samuel Colman

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. ~ Peter York

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. ~ Kevin McCloud

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

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

People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They're thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work. ~ Tom Kundig

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. ~ Peter York

Design is fluid. It's liquid. It moves like water and fills every space... ~ Justin Matthew Vance

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. ~ Herbert Simon

Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely place for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another. ~ Sally A. Kitt Chappell

For a brief period of time the American electric-sign industry looked beyond its most immediate market and collaborated with store designers and architects in creating a style which became known as 'stream-line.' Later it became known as 'American Déco.' Whatever it was called or will be called in the future, it represents in terms of neon a thrust away from isolated signage toward an area of architectural ornamentation in which signage is but one element in an overall plan. - Rudi Stern ~ Philip Di Lemme

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing. ~ Zaha Hadid

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We spent a lot of time trend forecasting and collaborating on ways to design a fresh line of fashion-forward, affordable luxury. ~ Kourtney Kardashian

The designs and my credit have been stolen from me, since I alone have designed the Alien. So why does Fox not give me the credit I rightfully earned? As for those responsible for this conspiracy: all I can wish them is an Alien breeding inside their chests, which might just remind them that the Alien father is HR Giger. ~ H.R. Giger

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. ~ John Ruskin

The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father. ~ Victor Hugo

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about. ~ Linus Torvalds

Remember, the web isn't about control. If a visitor to your site is familiar with using a browser's native form doodad, you won't be doing them any favors if you override the browser functionality with your own widget, even if you think your widget looks better. ~ Jeremy Keith

The first thing one learns about typography & type design is that these rules are made to be broken. ~ Jeffery Keedy

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.

She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that.

He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on.

She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it.

She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.

He said, I guess we're safe. ~ Margaret Atwood

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. ~ Howard Aiken

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them. ~ Atom Egoyan

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person. ~ Alain De Botton

The second is that some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl "I'm here for you", the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed, or maybe just acknowledged a commitment. It has nothing to do with guilt for earlier crimes (although she has a pretty fair understanding of what she deserves), or any hope of redemption. It's just the outermost point on an arc. She's risen as far as she can, and now she's falling again, no longer in control (if she ever was to start with) of her own movements. ~ M.R. Carey

Home is where you hang your hangover. ~ James Crumley

The outside world is a design of our imagination. ~ Christopher Dines

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. ~ N.D. Wilson

I think a lot more people are able to take on a design challenge than ever before. And this was true 20 years ago when the desktop publishing revolution came about that allowed people with Macintosh's at home to produce professional-looking newsletters or publications for the first time. So, there's a long march toward more democratization for design. ~ Khoi Vinh

Typography exists to honor content. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Brands play in an exciting sandbox of symbolic meanings. ~ Laura Busche

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones. ~ Joe Elliott

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

I'd love to design stuff that I'd like to wear and that other people could wear, too. ~ Dionne Bromfield

The future is created at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture. *In the Bubble* is an insightful and delightful explanation of this nexus and of how each force affects the others. Designers often miss a great deal in their educations about the real people who will use and inhabit their work. Thackara astutely illuminates a lot of what designers don't know they're missing. ~ Nathan Shedroff

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [ ... ] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. ~ Fred Brooks

Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. (80) ~ Michael Shermer

The question of whether a device will come into being depends upon three things: first, whether there is a practical use for it that warrants its development and manufacturing costs; second, whether the laws of physics applying to the elements available for its design allow the attainment of the needed ranges, sensitivities, or the like; and third, whether the pertinent art of manufacture has advanced sufficiently to allow a useful embodiment to be built successfully. ~ Vannevar Bush

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions. ~ Philip Johnson

Then what exactly is it that you design?"
He gave a proud smile.
"Bitless compositions."
"Bitless? You mean, from bits, the units of information?"
"No, Mr. Tichy, the units of being bitten. ~ Stanislaw Lem

The whole experience co-curating the Biennial was a learning experience. The Suburban and The Poor Farm are not institutions. They are not by design, organized around power structures. Because I am someone who thrives on delineating context, seeing up close the inner workings of the museum was not wasted on me. ~ Michelle Grabner

The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description. ~ Anthony Trollope

Exploitations for other purposes happens only when we are living outside the design of the creator's intention ~ Sunday Adelaja

When does a building actually become a built? ~ Le Corbusier

When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.
Ford replied,'Produce it anyway. ~ Henry Ford

I love design in general, the creativity. Whether it is golf courses, my apparel line, ads we do or our business with AriZona, design is fun. ~ Jack Nicklaus

Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved. ~ Martin Filler

Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts. ~ Paul Rand

A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares. ~ Edward Tufte