Organic Architecture Quotes

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

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

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials ... ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

The mineral kingdom consists of the fossil substances found in the earth. These are either entirely destitute of organic structure, or, having once possessed it, possess it no longer: such are the petrefactions. ~ Torbern Bergman

It does not seem, however, that organic chemists were much worried about barriers to rotation in organic molecules in general at that time because there was no technique available to demonstrate the phenomenon experimentally. ~ Derek Harold Richard Barton

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations. ~ Ben Horowitz

When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives. To express spirituality, the architect has to think of the original material of architecture, space and light. ~ Richard Meier

The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

The computer is a tool akin to a telescope or a microscope; a tool that opens vast frontiers of possibilities and brings them to light; a tool that captures the elemental and animates or holds it still at will; a tool that captures the organic flow of the earth's crust or the wash of a wave, and creates an impossible symmetry, an elemental Rorshach pattern ripe for continued exploration, divulging a thousand revelations. ~ John Paul Caponigro

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space. ~ Tadao Ando

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades. ~ Martin Filler

Architecture is a political act, by nature. It has to do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living. ~ Lebbeus Woods

I'm a little bit phobic about stains on my clothes, so I never travel without a little packet of organic stain remover. ~ John Malkovich

Form ever follows function. ~ Louis Sullivan

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination. ~ Paul Russell

Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It's like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Watching what you eat ought to include knowing what what you eat ate. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives. ~ Carolyn Kizer

He is fascinated by their lack of conventional hierarchy or structure and loves how the forces of capital have subverted plans to control and order space. ~ Graham Owen

The behavioral programme of the post-social society during the post-capitalism interregnum is governed by a neoliberal ethos of competetive self-improvement, of untiring cultivation of one's marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks inherent in a world that has outgrown government. That this programme is dutifully implemented is essential, as the reproduction of the post-capitalist society lite hangs on the thin thread of an accommodating systematic architecture. Structuralist critique of false institutions may therefore have to be complemented by a renewed culturalist critique of false consciousness. ~ Wolfgang Streeck

I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am. ~ Kristen Wiig

Architecture is about public space held by buildings. ~ Richard Rogers

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?' ~ Thom Mayne

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

Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative ... Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts "discovered" about organic beings. ~ Donna J. Haraway

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s. ~ Douglas Coupland

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. ~ Neal Stephenson

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds, come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil. ~ Natalie Goldberg

The Mistress of the Manor (Hoyt calls her MOM) has no idea he shoots the skunks and raccoons he traps on her property. She has asked him please to release the creatures in some other vicinity, a "humane" act that only makes them somebody's else's problem. Typical: MOM sees nothing contradictory in driving twenty miles in a gas-guzzling atmosphere-choking SUV to buy organic vegetables. ~ Sarah Kernochan

In all matters but particularly in architecture ... that which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles ... One who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. ~ Edward O. Wilson