Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 4

To Jane Jacob’s three traditional urban values of civic space, human scale and diversity, the current environmental imperative adds two more: conservation and regionalism.

I like to think of my best moment on the job as quiet victories. Victories over what? Over the "system", over the various bureaucracies not watching me, over my colleagues' indifference, over my patron's ignorance, over the very concept of horn-blowing pride.

Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it.

I need not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools to prove myself an artist ... Whilst in other spheres of labor the greater part of our life's toil and moil will of a surety end, as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the end, our labor will be crowned with flowers.

There's a good reason catas say me-ow rather than we-ow or you-ow.

To plant is but a part of landscape composition; to co-ordinate is all.

We unfortunately live in a corporate world where group decision making is made to avoid failure rather than to achieve success.

Every design is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.

Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to do it.

The artistic taste of the Catholic priests is appalling and I am most anxious to have a Catholic church in which everything is genuine and good, and not tawdry and ostentatious.

I believe buildings are alive, and when you want to make a change, you have to change in the same symphony.

I am but an architectural composer.

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.

The task of the architectural project is to reveal, through the transformation of form, the essence of the surrounding context.

When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.

Some architects think of clients only as sources of work and income but most good architecture is in fact the result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client.

Some people in the utility industry have called it 'circling the drain'

Light belongs to the heart and spirit. Light attracts people, it shows the way, and when we see it in the distance, we follow it.

Buildings should be good neighbours.

Something impractical cannot be beautiful.

It is not possible to design always the same. How to be different in each different place - that is the most important work and duty of the architect to find out.

I am learning to live, and to see beauty in everything.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

Automobile is one of the most successful inventions of all time, but in my view, it is thoroughly obsolete already. And so by fundamentally rethinking the automobile, thinking of it as a robot on four wheels, essentially, something that can communicate with other intelligent devices, it can operate in a coordinated way, you can really start to fundamentally rethink urban personal mobility.

There is no magical solution because urban traffic congestion arises from the fact that a lot of people want to be in the same place at the same time often.

And you finally get to a consensus, where you get a sense of what really ought to be done, and then they give it to me and then I draw it. I mean draw it in the sense, the philosophical sense.

I kind of cherish at least the idea of Midwestern candor and openness. But I couldn't live there.

Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.

Our houses are at least 12 feet under water. All you can see on TV are rooftops. And the bridge we came across, the I-10 twin span, is now split.

Architects design houses. I live in a home.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

I see the task of architecture as the defense of the authenticity of human experience

Murana is the name of the mask I have designed for Venini: a volume to wear for filtering the reality through the glass of its surfaces, a face without sexual or racial connotations able to represent every kind of humanity, a soul for an object that could be casually perceived as a vase.

That's what I love about Chicago... It is the staccato aspect of the skyscrapers. But the ground is very loose, very relaxed. It makes Chicago far more pleasant than other cities.

Schinkel was not arbitrary in his use of historical modes but rather eclectic in the best sense of the word. He could search the past for its conspicuous successes using them both freely and discursively as the basis for a contemporary architecture.

To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.

What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.

A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks himself about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems he proposes.

Quoting E. B. White is the easiest way I know of to fool people into thinking that I am perceptive, witty, and wise.

One cannot create happiness with beautiful objects, but one can spoil quite a lot of happiness with bad ones

In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.

When my kids were toddlers, they had all these rotomolded plastic things. My life became surrounded by big, hollow plastic toys - from the scale of playhouses down to rocking horses, and everything in between - which we would then take to the secondhand store. But we'd get sentimentally attached and hate to see them go.

The criteria for architecture after the tsunami is humbleness

The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you.

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

Like medicine (architecture) must move from the curative to the preventive.

We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.

I'm not inventing anything new, I'm just using existing material differently.

Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.

To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

... All the drivers that started the replace-tape-with-disk movement in the first place - reliability, performance, portability and off-site data movement - are now liabilities in a disk only strategy.

My buildings should have an emotional core - a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.

Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical means like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically