Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 12

It comes to me every day of my life that a home spirit is being awakened amongst us, that as a nation we are beginning to realize how important it is to have homes of our own, homes that we like, that we have been instrumental in building, that we will want to have belong to our children.

There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.

I think architecture, to be really intense and fulfilling, doesn't have to be large.

Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.

People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of.

Schinkel's aesthetic was not a crudely materialistic "truth to material" affair... but rather an attempt to inform iron and other industrial materials with an appropriate beauty through the direct collaboration of the artist in the manufacturing process.

I believe in gardening the soil as well as the soul.

I still listen to black metal all the time - that's obviously one of my favorite kinds of music - but I steer from it very strongly.

When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned.

God gives us relatives; thank God, we can choose our friends.

Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. I'm not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.

Architecture, either practically considered or viewed as an art of taste, is a subject so important and comprehensive in itself, that volumes would be requisite to do it justice. Buildings of every description, from the humble cottage to the lofty temple, are objects of such constant recurrence in every habitable part of the globe, and are so strikingly indicative of the intelligence, character, and taste of the inhabitants, that they possess in themselves a great peculiar interest for the mind.

Golf is a game, and talk and discussion is all to the interests of the game. Anything that keeps the game alive and prevents us being bored with it is an advantage. Anything that makes us think about it, talk about it, and dream about it is all to the good and prevents the game becoming dead.

Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty.

Humble birth did not retard his genius, nor high place corrupt his soul.

Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

I think architecture has to be a gift.

For where else, if not in the home, can we let our imagination wander?

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

Better use of space, improving the insulation, getting more daylight into the buildings, reducing the energy consumption of the air conditioning and heating systems, making sure that the internal air quality is good, that we have increased natural ventilation opportunities in the mid seasons. You know these are some of the things we can do.

I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial.

You have to think of a restaurant as a series of impressions. But what makes my job so great is there's no one answer that's right for every restaurant.

I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.

The transformation of nature, a total fusion of science, art and technology in a sublime statement of human dignity and intelligence through the settlements we build for ourselves.

For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

Art was born as a desire, not as a demand.

I would never live in anything I design. Life and art are different. My life is very precious to me - my art is precious to me. I love designing things for other people, but I don't like designing things for myself.

If we could combine Starbucks' spirit with the spirit of the artisan, we knew we could achieve something special.

A room is not a room without natural light.

A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.

The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.

In the 1960s, Robert Venturi and I played a game we called ‘I can like something worse than you can like.’

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

I went into architecture a little as 'Peck's Bad Boy.' It allowed me to be a critic in a socially condoned way.

And you have to remember that I came to America as an immigrant. You know, on a ship, through the Statue of Liberty. And I saw that skyline, not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as really the substance of the American Dream.

Cities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. It is equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.

The Bow’s passive approach to solar control and ventilation are implicit in its form, supported by an interesting structural system that is legible on the building’s exterior.

A house isn't really understandable until it settles into the site: until it's built, furnished and lived in for four or five years. The reality is not on paper but in how a building sits on the land - how it relates to trees, to slopes, to water, to gardens.

Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.

I think it is fair to say that during World War II there was a high sense of purpose. The country had a very clear vision of its own standing, of its own morality. It was not an ambiguous time. Today, we live in a world that is highly ambiguous, very fractured, with many of the historical, traditional values in a state of collapse, really.

My work is not about 'form follows function,' but 'form follows beauty' or, even better, 'form follows feminine.'

I have come to the conviction that once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

When I am true to my inspiration, even fight for my design, the project always turns out well.

Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.

A house is a machine for living in.

Where there is a will there is a lawsuit.

I have only one dream. It is the oldest of humanity, of man, in time. It is paradise. I would like to give paradise to everyone.

Some architects have a preconceived notion of what a building should be

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

You could walk out of the house, but you always returned home.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.