Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 11

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.

There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

Argentina is a marvelous place. Argentines are great bankers of information. They import information; if someone sneezes in Milan or in New York, they clean their faces very fast there.

A railway station is something that can generate a city.

Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.

What's nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.

If you're going to dream, why dream small?

We are now becoming more aware of our links to the universe and are reaching out to the universe for knowledge. We are evolving from earth creatures to star creatures. Our minds now explore the worlds beyond, and we sense a destiny beyond this planet.

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

If [a woman] insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If then, she was still determined, I would give her my blessing – she could be that exceptional one.

In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life.

I'm not left-wing, or right-wing. With only one wing I couldn't fly, and I just couldn't have that.

Every plant has its fitness and must be placed in its proper surroundings so as to bring out its full beauty. Therein lies the art of landscaping.

When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change.

I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.

Beauty is the oracle that speaks to us all.

Architecture must make connections

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.

Beware of over-confidence; especially in matters of structure.

People are not killed by earthquakes alone, but by collapsed buildings.

He who owns a wood of proper land in this country, and, in the face of all the personal riches of the day, only raises crabs and choke pears, deserves to lose the respect of all sensible men.

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

Transparency is not the same as looking straight through a building: it's not just a physical idea, it's also an intellectual one.

Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.

But freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when the body is in bondage.

The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design.

The road to energy independence, economic recovery, and greenhouse gas reductions runs through the building sector.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

Architecture is not a profession, it is a discipline.

Some people think architecture is about the genius sketch; I don't. Great architecture is a collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time.

Architecture is an applied art, founded not on theories but on practice.

Lost are many great commissions by such neglect.

I'm ashamed to be German.

We've concocted a system where local trips take an auto. That's our biggest tragedy. Streetcars, such as those used in Portland's Pearl District, and elevated people movers, like those in downtown Miami, are moving people from rail stations to their final destinations. But a new concept, PRT, may help revolutionize urban transportation, providing a cost-effective way to get people from train stations to where they need to go.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.

Good buildings make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate, culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations and for all times.

To become an Architect in the right sense of the word means that a man shall give his life to it and nothing else, and shall study the work he has to do with enthusiastic interest in every detail pertaining to it, and content himself with nothing less than complete success.

We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

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.

It is not really necessary to destroy nature in order to gain God's favor or even his undivided attention.

I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events ... by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator.

Exile is a series of photographs without texts.

If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational.

Hunts Point Revival's reuse of the existing structure as part of the new development was conceptually bold and challenging. Overall, the project contained a good blend of creative sustainable design elements. The solar room for heating and ventilation was particularly creative and convincing.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Architecture should have little to do with problem solving - rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

An absolutely different and distinctive character.

When I draw something, the brain and the hands work together.

To lead a successful life, then, it's a good idea to work out what you really want. Then get together some plans. Then set some goals.

We need to treat the planet as a system, and up until now, we've operated more as if the world were made of separate parts - this part is environment, this part is economy. But everything is connected. You can't fix global warming with a Ph.D. in thermodynamics!

With all the challenges in the housing market, it's clear we need a new vision for the way we design our homes, our communities-and even our lives.

I used to buy nice clothes and drive a nice car when I couldn't afford it. But I spent all my money doing it, and now I don't have to. I like nice things. I like to travel in a certain style. I like to live in a nice place.

Green Giant contained a very strong and clear site and building design concept. Green Giant had strong formal, aesthetic and programmatic concepts, coupled with a good understanding and incorporation of 2030 Palette design strategies.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

For me, architecture is not just creating a space to protect people but to make them dream as well.