Quotes about Architecture

“You can just drift unhappily towards this vision of heaven on earth, and ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of: Heaven on earth, at it's best.”

“The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.”

“For me, architecture is not just creating a space to protect people but to make them dream as well.”

“Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.”

“The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.”

“A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.”

“My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.”

“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.”

“Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.”

“The architecture for 'Paladin' - given that it's at least three books, with the possibility of more - turned out to be bigger than anything I've ever created, with multiple levels of reality, interlocking mysteries and a terabyte of time frame.”

“In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.”

“Of course I know very little about architecture, and the older I get the less I know.”

“The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.”

“I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.”

“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.”

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

“I like to make a tour round the pitch before games to look at the architecture, the colours in the stadium, the sky, to feel the atmosphere growing.”

“Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.”

“The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.”

“I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.”