Martin Filler Quotes About Architecture

Quotes about: Architecture

• Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

  Martin Filler

  Way, Architecture, Sometimes

• One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

  Martin Filler

  Dream, Movement, Architecture

• All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Order, Lines

• One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

  Martin Filler

  People, Goal, Use

• Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Growth, Renaissance

• The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

  Martin Filler

  Successful, Cities, Expansion

• Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.

  Martin Filler

  Twenties, Architecture, Century

• By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

  Martin Filler

  Years, Design, Style

• Considering my specialization in architecture, I'm not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's 'Batman: Death by Design.'

  Martin Filler

  Design, Firsts, Architecture

• Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Construction Workers, Design

• Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.

  Martin Filler

  Design, Quality, Typical

• The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

  Martin Filler

  Technology, Men, Architecture

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

  Martin Filler

  Architecture, Weak, Hearted

• Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved.

  Martin Filler

  Imagination, Avant Garde, Natural Elements

• There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

  Martin Filler

  Defining, Movement, Architecture

• Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.

  Martin Filler

  Practice, Lasts, Architecture

• Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

  Martin Filler

  Art, School, Design

  "The Brief, Glorious Life Of Bauhaus (New York Review)" by Martin Fuller, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 18, 2010.

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