Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 13

I'm not a creature of habit. I like to find things from unexpected sources.

A good golf course is like good music or good anything else; it is not necessarily a course which appeals the first time one plays over it, but one which grows on the player the more frequently he visits it.

Faith sir! She looks like the Old Course.

Employ oneself upon trifling professional matters which others could do.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

No man is worth having is true to his wife, or can be true to his wife, or ever was, or ever will be so.

Virtue is its own reward. There's a pleasure in doing good which sufficiently pays itself.

One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.

The Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio comes from afar. Our land has a millennial history of emigrations: master masons, architects, builders, decorators, plasterers, artists from the world of building.

The ecologist has a much more comprehensive and holistic view of the world. We're looking at the natural environment as well as the human built environment and the connectivity between the two - how do the natural environment and the human-built environment interact and interface with each other.

Buildings should not look like Lady Gaga.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things.

The worst-tempered people I've ever met were the people who knew they were wrong.

Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.

Modern architecture is not a style, it's an attitude

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.

We must redefine the American Dream before we rebuild the infrastructure on which it is based.

You only understand information relative to what you already understand.

There be delights that will fetch the day about from sun to sun and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream ... For a garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe - his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise ... a world where gayety knows no eclipse and winter and rough weather are held at bay.

We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public.

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.

And with a few moments like that, with doubt from here and there, and within ourselves we were just striving for excellence. We had somehow understood and felt that all the musicians who would come to the House later on, that all the singers, the big artists, were striving for excellence in their life and we thought a house for them, there’s no limit to the excellence it should have because it should match their strive for perfection

It is not possible to go forward while looking back.

Tradition is the social equivalent of personal habit.

We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time.

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.

To be truly free, it takes more determination, courage, introspection, and restraint than to be in shackles.

I make no special difference between architecture and design, they are two different stages of invention.

Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company. Only a few love to be alone.

Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.

I choose work that is hard to pull off. And it's scary how things can go wrong. But if there's no risk involved, it's not challenging. A good idea will survive any process.

The problem for a lot of people is that they don't really know what they want. They have vague desire: to 'do something creative' or to earn more money or 'to be free', but they can't really pin down what it is precisely that they want. So they drift from one thing to another, enjoying some moments and hating others, but never really finding fulfillment or success. (..) This is why it's hard to lead a successful life (whatever that means to you) when you don't know what you want.

Type is one of the most eloquent means of expression in every epoch of style. Next to architecture, it gives the most characteristic portrait of a period and the most severe testimony of a nation's intellectual status.

I don't separate architecture, design, or culture. What's more important is a language of creativity that carries meaning.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

You can just never desist. You have to always push back, whatever the pressures put on you.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They're thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work.

Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.

I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.

The awesomeness of God is that even in the works of the Beach Boys, Beatles, etc., the beauty of the music is a mere reflection of what God does everyday. He creates music of all kinds and moods.

Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.

I wanted to clear up the slum of legs… I wanted to make the chair all one thing again.

Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

Light is impressionism.

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.

Being the gateway to a large city, St. Louis, I had felt from the very beginning that somehow this building should symbolize this sense of being a gateway.

The suburb was the major element of Australian society.

Plant spacious parks in your cities, and loose their gates as wide as the morning, to the whole people.

I believe that we must understand the economy of the situation.

I don't know how to use appliances. I mean, I use the coffee maker. But that's it.

At about five I knew I was going to be an architect because my mother had studied architecture. I thought it was women's work. I had a proprietary feeling about architecture. I could own it because my mother owned it.

A painter, a sculptor, a writer, they can express freely. They don't affect society as a whole. We build buildings that have a purpose, that stay there for hundreds of years or decades.

If an architect's ego is very small, he is done for it; if it is vast then he might make some very important contributions.

Technology should be used to create unforgettable experiences that enhance our natural and built environments, transforming them in newly meaningful ways.

I'm not an answering machine, I'm a questioning machine. If we have all the answers, how come we're in such as mess?

I wanted people to connect with the lyrics, even if it's in some weird way, because they're all personal.