Quotes about Architecture

“Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.”

“In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn't very good at it.”

“It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?”

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”

“Forms in nature are a byproduct of a reciprocal action between a given material and the conditions of the environment. But in architecture, the process is the direct opposite: First you decide on the form, and then you think how to build it in reality.”

“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.”

“To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.”

“Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.”

“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.”

“I'm very interested in architecture.”

“Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.”

“In the United States alone, 450 billion square feet of glass facade is produced every year. What if we could take this chance to use the glass to harness solar energy and allow the architecture to respond to the light and heat of the sun, to create photosynthesis and generate solar energy?”

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

“There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.”

“Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.”

“I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.”

“There's a very mathematical, mechanical side to architecture, and I probably lean more toward that aspect of it, though I'm terrible at numbers. But that side appeals to me more than the decorating aspect.”

“I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.”

“I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.”

“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.”

“In general, Tor architecture is not suited for protecting anonymity of long-term, popular web services.”