Quotes about Architecture

“I am a failed architect, if I'm honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I've got really bad spatial awareness.”

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

“I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.”

“Great architecture of the past was always clear. SFMOMA is still a simple building to understand.”

“I'm not an interior decorator; I'm a designer, and that includes the architecture. The package must be strong and controlled, the rooms aligned, and the windows positioned to make sense with the furniture. Fluff it up, and you've got big trouble.”

“When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.”

“When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.”

“Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.”

“I love architecture.”

“I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.”

“Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?”

“A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.”

“The U.K. has been at the forefront of developing the climate change policy architecture that can ensure climate action is integrated into economic decision making.”

“Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.”

“Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.”

“Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.”

“Less is more.”

“All of these technologies that we are putting together... our memory technology, our CPU, our graphics architecture, our GPUs - all that is being applied to where the data is. You can almost predict where Intel will be in the future. It will be where data resides.”

“I studied Russian history at school, and I absolutely loved St Petersburg. It was magnificent - the architecture is incredible and has quite a significant Dutch influence.”

“Architecture is about public space held by buildings.”

“But after the time there I'd had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn't last very long.”