Quotes on Architecture

The elms of New England! They are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.

Architecture is not just for the moment, it is not just for the next fashion magazine.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony.

The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.

There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 - you can't actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you've already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.

For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible.

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.

Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.

The room is the beginning of architecture.

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.