Quotes on Architecture

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.

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

I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.

I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.

When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

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.

For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects.

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

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

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.

Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.

Architecture is always political.

The future of architecture is culture.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.