Settembrino Architects Quotes

Alberto Alessi had asked a dozen architects to design a sterling silver tea service - with a teapot, a coffee pot, sugar, creamer, a spoon, and a tray. Our brief was that it didn't matter if it didn't work and cost wasn't the issue. It was a promotional project, not a commercial enterprise, and was going to be showcased in museums. And the coffee and tea piazza, as mine was called, received a great response. It was wonderful to walk into the Whitney museum and see all these objects on the first floor. ~ Michael Graves

To You"

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations' blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there's no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long long time just as
the words "I'll always love you"

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river ~ Frank O'Hara

Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway. ~ Akiko Busch

The decisions of our past are the architects of our present. ~ Dan Brown

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

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important. ~ Annie Dillard

Form follows function, as the architects say. With words and pictures, you can do just about anything. ~ Bill Watterson

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever. For me, the world is simply composed of stories; when I look, that's what I see. ~ Neil Gaiman

Today's enterprise IT architecture is about integrating systems to meet business needs. Consequently, IT architects can't - and don't - live in a vacuum. To address that reality, Catalyst Conference 2006 will delve into strategic infrastructure technologies with the depth to which our clients have grown accustomed. With the larger number of Cross-Cutting Concerns sessions, we'll also clearly illustrate how these technologies relate to each other, and how roles, geographies, and business processes intersect within an enterprise. ~ Jamie Lewis

Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio. ~ Stephen M. Barr

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language. ~ Jamie L. Harding

Millwall fans are an earthy bunch, and there's nothing wrong with that, but many of them lack social graces, and the demographics are far removed from architect's impressions of the New Den, which is a superb ground ~ Karl Wiggins

The difference between regulated architects and unregulated designers is, unlike buildings, letterheads don't fall down and kill people. ~ Brian Webb

The quality of authors determines the quality of books.
The quality of musicians determines the quality of songs.
The quality of artists determines the quality of paintings.
The quality of architects determines the quality of buildings.

The quality of generals determines the quality of warriors.
The quality of preachers determines the quality of sermons.
The quality of scientists determines the quality of inventions.
The quality of leaders determines the quality of followers.

The quality of scholars determines the quality of lectures.
The quality of teachers determines the quality of students.
The quality of schools determines the quality of graduates.
The quality of graduates determines the quality of nations.

The quality of plants determines the quality of air.
The quality of air determies the quality of animals.
The quality of animals determines the quality of food.
The quality of food determines the quality of the planet. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

This wasn't just a band of frustrated Egyptian architects in Hamburg. It was much bigger than that,. and had nothing to do with frustration. It was about belief. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers. ~ Colleen Barrett

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ~ William S. Burroughs

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role. ~ Robert Irwin

The number of African Americans in my profession is woefully small; about two percent of architects in the country are black. I'd like to see more diversity. That's why whenever I'm asked to speak at middle and high schools I always say yes. ~ Philip Freelon

Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings. ~ Bjarke Ingels

Watching the painter painting
And all the time, the light is changing
And he keeps painting
That bit there, it was an accident
But he's so pleased
It's the best mistake, he could make
And it's my favourite piece
It's just great

--- excerpt from the song "An Architect's Dream" from the album Aerial ~ Kate Bush

Architects are the new comedians. ~ Simon Doonan

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. ~ Frank Gehry

Conversion requires a subtler mind. Architects don't like it, architects want to create their own landmark buildings so that people a few years hence will say, 'Oh, that building there is being knocked down, who did that one?' ~ Jonathan Meades

Architects must have a razor-sharp sense of individuality. ~ Richard Neutra

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

Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one; they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence. ~ Alain De Botton

We aren't born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am.
Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is 'a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom'. He also wrote that 'there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human'. This could well be the humanist motto. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The difference between me and the newer artists is that I have the history with the architects, the masters that started the music. I know where the music came from. ~ Ricky Skaggs

Brands must become architects of community. ~ Simon Mainwaring

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; ~ Stewart Brand

Metal buildings are the dream that Modern Architects had at the beginning of this century. It has finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it. That's because it doesn't take an Architect to build a metal building. You just order them out of a catalog - comes with a bunch of guys who put it together in a couple of days, maybe a week. And there you go - you're all set to go into business - just slap a sign out front. ~ David Byrne

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Thom Mayne

Women are the real architects of society. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

It has become somewhat trite, nowadays, to say that after so many years of destruction it is a kind of miracle that Paris is still standing, a miracle we thrill to every day. But if the beauty of Paris has survived wars, how extraordinary that it can do nothing against the pickaxes of the Parisians themselves when they make up their minds to demolish something, nor against the vagaries of their architects left to their own devices! ~ Julien Green

Building a baseball team is like building a house. You look for the best architects, the best builders - and then you let them do their jobs. ~ Pat Gillick

I'm strong-willed. Architects are strong-willed. You get the best results with a strong client and a strong architect working together. ~ Eli Broad