Quotes about Architecture

“Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?”

“If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.”

“When you go to a normal architecture firm they aren't going to be innovative in terms of their systems. They're not going to be thinking of the whole lifespan of this project, or how do we document every single light bulb, or every product, so that when a chair breaks in a conference room, we can replace it right away.”

“I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.”

“Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.”

“There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.”

“I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.”

“The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.”

“Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.”

“Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.”

“Architecture students are generally given theoretical projects, often located at distant locations, and told to come up with a design.”

“Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.”

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

“The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.”

“I have no requirements for a style of architecture.”

“Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.”

“Tension is an interesting quality - and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational.”

“If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.”

“Theatre is real-time - you get that real-time audience reaction, which is fantastic. And with art pieces, people don't ever have to explain themselves. You can do something and really follow a research. With architecture, you have to be much more public. You have to build consensus. You have to work within the law. There are more complexities.”

“In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.”

“Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.”