Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 15

As the avenues and streets of a city are nothing less than its arteries and veins, we may well ask what doctor would venture to promise bodily health if he knew that the blood circulation was steadily growing more congested!

I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life.

I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.

I love seeing people get excited.

I have always dreamt of becoming an artist, and I have always pursued that dream. But I’ve had to realize, that I wouldn’t make it as a painter, a sculptor or a musician. I have tried, but only in private

In all my activities as Armament Minister I never once visited a labor camp, and cannot, therefore, give any information about them.

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

The architect who really designs for a human being has to know a great deal more than just the Five Canons of Vitruvius.

Before computers, you'd start designing using shapes of cubes. Now I can start with something like a handkerchief, an object that doesn't have strong inside and outside boundaries or much closed volume.

Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.

There must be a union between the spirit in wood and the spirit in man. The grain of the wood must relate closely to its function. The abutment of the edge of one board to an adjoining board can mean the success or failure of a piece. () Gradually a form evolves, much as nature produces the tree in the first place. The object created can live forever. The tree lives on in its new form. The object cannot follow a transitory “style”, here for a moment, discarded the next. Its appeal must be universal. Cordial and receptive, it should invite a meeting with man

I hate digital calendars, so I use pen and paper or the palm of my hand for my daily schedule. I get much more satisfaction out of physically crossing things out than deleting.

'Fiancee' is a very fun word to say, because I never thought I would have a fiancee or be a fiancee. Sometimes when I would introduce myself and say, 'This is my girlfriend Melanie,' it wasn't always clear what I meant. Now I get to say, 'This is my fiancee Melanie.'

I don't believe in the word 'inspiration', you just have to do it.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy.

I had a beautiful childhood, so my adulthood has been really frustrating because it's - half the time it hasn't been as good as my childhood.

If the words make sense on paper, and make me feel good, and I feel like it will connect, that's all I'm worried about it.

I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is.

Mine was the role of the oilcan in making the machinery clunk around.

If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone,' then you only impact the few and not the many.

In reality some images or drawings have a greater impact than many buildings that are built.

Without a computer, every point on a structure has to be calculated with reference to everything else. But by using a PC, I can create complex curves that don't have radii or centers.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.

When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone.

Why do you dwell on things that don't matter when there are so many things that do?

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

We were all born with webbed feet and a golf club in our hand.

With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying.

I've grown up a little bit. I understand the importance of the negotiation. It is a collective act.

I designed a bench in a few moments. But, of course, it took me 25 years to do it.

In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building.

I think constraints are very important. They're positive, because they allow you to work off something.

Architecture is the king or queen of the arts.

If you like ice cream, why stop at one scoop? Have two, have three. Too much is never enough.

The orbit of human vision has widened and art has annexed fresh territories that were formerly denied to it.

In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.

People actually ask me why I bring in projects on budget and on time. It seems I am not living up to the fashionable genius role. I really enjoy when a project gets down to the wire, and through sheer force of will and faith in our process, we cross the goal line, when most people thought it impossible.

The most important issue of the 21st century will be the condition of the global environment.

I think the future of architecture does not lie so much in continuing to fill up the landscape, as in bringing back life and order to our cities and towns.

The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.

A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay.

Right now our blog on the presence of tape at EMC World is seeing twice as much traffic as all the other EMC World related content. Why? Many of our readers are coming to the obvious conclusion that tape, despite the negative marketing, is still an optimal way to protect and archive their information.

And any stone being mentally handled must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you.

Architects and food at a construction site equals indigestion. We're always looking for details that haven't been executed correctly.

Architecture is definitely a political act.

I make spaces that are calm rather than confrontational. I seek a certain kind of logic that allows you to move in space and perceive it as beautiful and rational. Clarity is a worthwhile quality.

Land is the secure ground of home, the sea is like life, the outside, the unknown.

It's most satisfying to have an effect on the public realm - deep down I think it's what every architect wants to do.

Set in the remote and harsh high desert landscape of Idaho, Outpost is an artist live/work studio and sculpture garden for making and displaying art. An important aspect of the complex is the protected paradise garden, which is separated from the wild landscape by thick masonry walls. The materials used in the structure, including concrete block, car-decking, and plywood, require little to no maintenance, and are capable of withstanding the extreme weather that characterize the desert’s four seasons.

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.

In the Sagrada Familia, everything is providential.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

My whole success is I've always been designing for people, first because I wanted to sell them merchandise. Then when I got into hotels, I had to rethink, what am I selling now? You're selling a good time.

Yet the small house, probably more than anything else that man has done, has made the face of Australia and to an extent the faces of Australians. Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage.

Decoration can be a state of mind, an unusual perception, a ritual whisper.

Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication. We can generate craft with the help of technology.

As I noted in my article "Comparing LTO-6 to Scale-Out Storage for Long-Term Retention," in these situations tape is an ideal storage type. Data on tape can still be automatically scanned for durability and it certainly meets the cost-effectiveness requirements.

Architecture is art, nothing else.