Fornataro Architecture Quotes

I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind. ~ Julius Shulman

I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential. ~ James Polshek

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture. ~ Tadao Ando

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

Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean's, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone. ~ Donald Bren

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry. ~ Ron Eglash

Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B. ~ Laura Linney

I don't believe in morality in architecture. ~ Michael Graves

The thing about architecture is that it's an art [you] simply learn more by doing more. It's one of those things that is really not an art about thinking, but doing. So in a way, what it has done is greatly intensify the way that I build. ~ David Adjaye

I am always surprised by how much little emphasis schools of architecture, and indeed, many architects, place on the process of the mating of a building. ~ Norman Foster

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent. ~ Minoru Yamasaki

Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men. Don't deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clankey and you've destroyed the press. Don't set out to raze all shrines – you'll frighten men, Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.

Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humour is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul – and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to obedience – anything goes – nothing is too serious. ~ Ayn Rand

It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. ~ William H. Whyte

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down. ~ Charles Jencks

Architecture is the printing-press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of the society in which it was erected, from the cromlech of the Druids to those toy-shops of royal bad taste ~ Sydney, Lady Morgan

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon. ~ Edith Wharton

Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it, ~ Lina Bo Bardi

The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited. ~ Frank Gehry

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

The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century. ~ Michael Graves

It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture - of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility. ~ John J. Carty

Sunset's the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.

Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it's on its last legs.

The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d'amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously. ~ Jacques Yonnet

The allure, huh?"
"I've learned a few things about castle architecture over the years." Liv wraps one arm around my waist. "The allure is a passage behind the parapet of a castle wall. Great for defense when the enemy is approaching. You know you're safe on the allure." She tucks her head beneath my chin, twining her hand with mine. "Like we're safe with each other."
"No doubt about it, beauty." I press my face against her sweet-smelling hair. "You'll always be my allure. ~ Nina Lane

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God. ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city? ~ Alexander McCall Smith

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

The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal-opportunity for all men, except for black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks. ~ Robin Boyd

I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture. ~ Sharon Horgan

I wanted a real profession. And I'd always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what's kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don't. ~ S.J. Rozan

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition. ~ John Updike

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial. ~ Martin Filler

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works. ~ Ai Weiwei

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been. ~ Peter Watson

Borges's extreme architecture attempts to visualize the universe by assigning to every object real and unreal, now and yet to come, a code or sign, a corresponding figure within the Library. It seeks to render totality visible, to effect a total visibility and visuality. The Library of Babel is a view of the universe inside and out, an X-ray of the universe and universal X-ray, seen from within and without. It is a representation of everywhere: a perfect duplication of the universe. And of you: universal. An endless and eternal cinema, an imaginary archive that extends into the universe until it is indistinguishable from it, until you are indistinguishable from the universe. ~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but abides steadily on to the very end of life. ~ Vitruvius

He'd discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable. They could be calculated and drawn on paper. They did not leak if they were made water tight, they did not collapse if they were properly supported. Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved. Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people. ~ Fredrik Backman

Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don't want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad? ~ Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture is not about form ~ Peter Zumthor

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

Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches ... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity. ~ Henry Spencer

I like it when people are driven. I love that in any field of work, in architecture or whatever. Like Lorne Michaels - he pays attention to every detail. ~ Fred Armisen

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet. ~ Ron Eglash

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love. ~ St. Lucia

Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company's profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy. ~ Jakob Nielsen

Chinese architecture has a complete organic structure; it contains both sensibility and purpose. ~ Wu Guanzhong

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. ~ Robert Smithson