A Quote by Vito Acconci

Sustainability has become a religion in architecture - not that there's anything wrong with it - but I think it has to work both ways. Everyone thinks architecture has to be subservient to sustainability, but what if we thought in the other direction, like, what can sustainability do to make architecture more exciting?

Vito Acconci

Quote Author

Vito Acconci
American - Designer
January 24, 1940 - April 28, 2017

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.

Rem Koolhaas

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.

Rem Koolhaas

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

Rem Koolhaas

When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic.

Carlo Carra

Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.

Raj Patel

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.

Rem Koolhaas

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

Cameron Sinclair

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Positive deviance means doing the right thing for sustainability, despite being surrounded by the wrong institutional structures, the wrong processes and stubbornly uncooperative people. That is what sustainability-literate leadership means today. Surrounded by evidence of rampant unsustainability it is not possible to say 'I did not know'

Sara Parkin

I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking.

Vandana Shiva

When I started university, I didn't know much about architecture, so I flipped through a lot of magazines, looking at different and exciting images from all over the world. I thought that architecture could be interesting.

Ma Yansong

There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.

Eduardo Souto de Moura

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.

Renzo Piano

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I've never had a problem with the old truism about dancing to architecture. I think you can dance to architecture. There's some pretty funky architecture to dance to.