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Architecture Quotes


"I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time."


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



"The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture."


"In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route."


"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."


"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."



"French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community."


"There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart."


"The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish."


"I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning."



"I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future."


"The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe."


"Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches."


"To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it."



"Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community."


"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall."


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


"If you're into architecture and you're from the West, everything is hors d'oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you're led there. You can't escape it."


"Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all."



"Solomon's temple also was designed to increase the attractiveness of the city of his residence."


"After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration."


"Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process."


"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space."


"Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society."


"Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul."


"The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of."



"The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value."


"Architecture is the reaching out for the truth."


"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention."


"Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built."


"The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture."


"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."


"Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture."



"Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England."


"People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train."



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


"I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year."


"The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models."


"After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings."


"Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts."


"But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean."


"I have no requirements for a style of architecture."


"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."


"Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art."


"I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly."


"I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us."



"I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines."


"My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture."
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