Architecture Quotes

Great artists need great clients. ~ I.M. Pei

If there is a reason for keeping the wall very quiet, choose a pattern that works all over without pronounced lines ... Put very succinctly, architectural effect depends upon a nice balance of horizontal, vertical and oblique. No rules can say how much of each; so nothing can really take the place of feeling and good judgement. ~ William Morris

One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession - but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor's chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way. ~ Sanford Meisner

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others. ~ Francis Bacon

Aldus Barnes, a structural engineer by training and member of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, has formed many successful collaborations and earned a prominent place for himself in architecture by adopting the language and skills of architects. "Talk in terms of texture and density, instead of torsion and shear. That way they don't think you are just another nerd," Barnes advises the young members of his team. ~ Yanni Alexander Loukissas

The next day, the cycle starts again. We're set out like decorative plates in this cavernous architecture, and such a craggy dining hall it is. Not exactly a Claude Monet cottage, more of a Medieval bastion - a vestige of Roman conquests. It still moans with the rickety sounds of age. I can almost hear the grumblings of ancient inhabitants. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand. ~ E. E. Cummings

Both the imagination and the architecture are infinite. ~ Aleksandra Mizielinska

Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I'd say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I've seen. ~ Sebastian Bach

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Church growth experts tell us that most people seeking a new church care little about its doctrines. They're mostly interested in the facilities of the church, its nursery, and opportunities for friendship. . . .The experts tell us that today's church members will switch churches at a moment's notice if they think that their personal and relational needs will be better met elsewhere--even if the doctrine taught is at best, suspect. Thus some will opt for better facilities and architecture even at the expense of jeopardizing their own soul. ~ Erwin W. Lutzer

To some extent I've always taken the architecture of the space into account. ~ Wade Guyton

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract ~ I.M. Pei

Only architecture that considers human scale and interaction is successful architecture. ~ Jan Gehl

I want each of you to go through life making the most of your individuality. Like it or not, you will go out into the real world and be treated as an adult. Adults show each other no mercy. If you fail to cultivate within yourself a fight-back mentality, society will end up controlling you. ~ Tadao Ando

Nature builds up her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring. ~ John Herschel

Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all. ~ Richard Whately

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The practice of architecture not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement. ~ Samuel

I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete. [ ... ] This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

Berlin is liberation. Architecture, man! ~ Michelle Rodriguez

Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture. ~ Robert L. Geddes

But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket , the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled ... 'Meters per second ' will integrate to 'meters.' The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall. ~ Thomas Pynchon

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

The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. ~ Ayn Rand

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Your new kitchen should look like it was "born there." That doesn't mean it has to be the exact same style as the house. (You can put a modern kitchen into a Victorian, for example.) It just means that it has to complement the spaces around it. ~ Jamie Gold

In architecture volume can be seen to be either a portion of space contained and defined by wall, floor and ceiling or roof planes or a quantity of space displaced by the mass of the building. ~ Francis D.K. Ching

My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books. ~ Jude Deveraux

Architecture is a subtle and difficult art. It needs dedication and involves pain. Being able 'to architect' is not a capacity that can be developed to sophisticated levels quickly and easily. ~ Simon Unwin

This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking. ~ Adrian McKinty

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown. ~ Cherie Lunghi

Dream Song 55
Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.
The architecture is far from reassuring.
I feel uneasy.
A pity, - the interview began so well:
I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away
and sloshed out a martini
strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters
God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,
John's energy,
anti-matter matter. I felt fine.
Then a change came backward. A chill fell.
Talk slackened,
died, and began to give me sideways looks.
'Chirst,' I thought 'what now?' and would have askt for another
but didn't dare.
I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,
some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:
'We betrayed me. ~ John Berryman

References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual ~ Dan Brown

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 is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed. ~ William Morris

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Architecture is not created by individuals. The genius sketch ... is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together, and in fact, success usually has more to do with dumb determination than with genius. ~ Joshua Prince-Ramus

I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. ~ Carl Rogers

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing-one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me. ~ Paul Halmos

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

The architect's role is to fight for a better world, where he can produce an architecture that serves everyone and not just a group of privileged people. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye. ~ Annabelle Selldorf

Architecture cannot change the economic machinations of globalization. ~ Graham Owen

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture. ~ James Wyatt

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved. ~ Petr Beckmann

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. ~ Ayn Rand

I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling. ~ Brad Pitt

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

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. ~ Rem Koolhaas

You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. ~ John Ruskin

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. ~ Arne Jacobsen

As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." So maybe today they're writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that's an adjustment for the age. ~ Fareed Zakaria

As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda. Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days she ran her fingers over the names carved into the fragmented bones of ruined loves, stepping around the broken pillars of unkept vows and dusting headstones in the graveyard of love with her hands. Every kind of death had a resting place in the dry lands.
She walked until her feet bled. ~ Josephine Angelini

You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft ~ Jason Fried

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality. ~ Thom Mayne

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, and the fall of the 'spectacle-commodity economy. ~ Tom McDonough

My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now - our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today. ~ Jean Nouvel

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. ~ Donna Tartt

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

Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois. ~ Le Corbusier

The ultimate aim of all artistic activity is building! ... Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all get back to craft! ... The artist is a heightened manifestation of the craftsman ... Let us form ... a new guild of craftsmen without the class divisions that set out to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! ... Let us together create the new building of the future which will be all in one: architecture and sculpture and painting. ~ Walter Gropius

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

For a long time, nobody had figured out Information Architecture, so we all just made stuff up. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

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

Art in progress. MAK has occupied a unique and valuable space as international host for discourse between the arts and architecture. ~ 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. ~ Thom Mayne

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

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice. ~ Victor Hugo

On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself. ~ Dean Koontz

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. ~ Stephen Sondheim

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles? ~ Jeremy Renner

But what if we are dealing with fools? ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

We all love musical architecture; there's no doubt about that. ~ Levon Helm

Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century. ~ Kenneth Frampton

A painting that is well composed is half finished. ~ Pierre Bonnard

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. ~ Steve Martin

Constructing a strong and beautiful sentence is the highest form of architecture. Because whereupon seeing a beautiful building one may think, but to read a sentence one has to think. ~ Garry Fitchett

Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition. ~ John Portman

My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body. ~ Christian Dior

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it). ~ Alain De Botton

How much does your building weigh?
A question often used to challenge architects to consider how efficiently materials were used for the space enclosed. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use. ~ John Ruskin

Life is blood and death and fear and joy and fierce architecture, man. ~ Gin Phillips

The first thing you must know as an actor or director is the space you will inhabit. See the architecture; imagine where things can happen in space. ~ Robert Wilson

As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do. ~ Jimenez Lai

White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it. ~ Al Sharpton

After my last divorce, I said I was absolutely going to marry somebody in another field, an aid worker or something. Then I met Brad, everything I wasn't looking for, but the best man, the best father I could possibly wish for, you know? I don't see him as an actor. I see him very much as a dad, as somebody who loves travel and architecture more than being in movies. ~ Angelina Jolie

Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax. ~ Rebecca West

Home development is about wishful thinking. It's about capturing a dream. ~ Barbara Delinsky

Architecture was always the plan. I always figured I'd just do theater on the side. ~ Michael Lomenda

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire. ~ Edward Gibbon

I'd like to do a lot of things - whether in design or architecture or business. ~ Caroline Wozniacki

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. ~ Tony Scott

Error processing is turning out to be one of the thorniest problems of modern computer science, and you can't afford to deal with it haphazardly. Some people have estimated that as much as 90 percent of a program's code is written for exceptional, error-processing cases or housekeeping, implying that only 10 percent is written for nominal cases (Shaw in Bentley 1982). With so much code dedicated to handling errors, a strategy for handling them consistently should be spelled out in the architecture. ~ Steve McConnell