Top 871 Architecture Quotes & Sayings

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates.

Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

I'm trying to create architecture as landscape. But I'm not copying nature.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.

In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That's what today's architecture community should be.

What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.

What if we treat the high-rise like a mountain, or we have gardens in the sky, or waterfalls? I think that's the most challenging thing I want to try in my architecture.

A pool at the edge of the ocean is the simplest geometry, yet you feel connected to the sea. In a forest with the mountains in the background, you also feel the connection to nature, yet it's a very complex geometry. I think architecture is about controlling these feelings.

Princeton University's campus environment presents unique challenges and opportunities for architecture to act as a social condenser.

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

Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.

The architecture scene in China is the most open and free climate compared to many other places. You can find many opportunities.

As a mature and responsible nation, one of India's foreign policy interests is to evolve a regional architecture based on the twin principles of shared security and shared prosperity.

The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.

What people want, above all, is order.

The way we do our architecture is to show that we can come up with our own solutions. We don't just take orders.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

I love art in general - architecture, anything creative.

Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.

Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate.

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.

The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.

If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

Oscar Niemeyer really inspired me. He's from South America, where nature has meaning. And his architecture was not expensive or high tech but artistic and spiritual. I like that.

When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture.

The impact of the creative industries, of design and architecture in particular, are of course economic and they are a great export opportunity.

Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.

Doctrines provide an architecture for both Republican and Democrat presidents to carry out policies.

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

Less is more.

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.

Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.

My first venture to Qatar was with WWE. It was an incredible tour and we stayed at a luxurious hotel. I ventured out by myself and wandered down to a shopping center and there was beautiful architecture everywhere.

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

The shan-shui city idea is trying to bring traditional values and ways of living to modern high-rise architecture.

In China, it's very easy to make architecture special because anything you design will look different, as most parts of the city are very similar. They make so many massive residential buildings.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material - more of an environment, not a product.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

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

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?

When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn't get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead.

Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.

I started off in journalism 16 years ago in Stockholm, and I wrote for a few different publications for many years. I've also worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director, but I changed it for architecture at 25 years old.

Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.