Architecture Quotes - Page 5

• Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Years, Discrepancies Between, Culture

  Interview with Marcus Fairs, www.iconeye.com. June 2004.

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

  T. E. Lawrence

  Details, Ornaments, World

  Letter to Bruce Rogers, August 20, 1931.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

  Maya Lin

  Artist, Want, Tiny

  10 Copy quote

• They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wine, Literature, Olives

  Henry David Thoreau (1995). “Walden, Or, Life in the Woods”, p.30, Courier Corporation

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

  Lionel Trilling

  Art, Cynical, Immature

  In Esquire Sept. 1962. Cf. Igor Stravinsky 210:16

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

  Voltaire

  Fighting, History, Ancient

  10 Copy quote

• The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.

  John Green

  Real, House, Looks

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.139, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Scientists like myself merely use their gifts to show up that which already exists, and we look small compared to the artists who create works of beauty out of themselves. If a good fairy came and offered me back my youth, asking me which gifts I would rather have, those to make visible a thing which exists but which no man has ever seen before, or the genius needed to create, in a style of architecture never imagined before, the great Town Hall in which we are dining tonight, I might be tempted to choose the latter.

  Max Perutz

  Science, Artist, Men

  7 Copy quote

• I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

  Isaac Asimov

  Children, Real, Educational

  Isaac Asimov (2009). “I, Asimov: A Memoir”, p.54, Bantam

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The laws of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

  Thomas Reid

  Science, Law, House

  Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, Harry M. Bracken, Thomas Reid, Sir William Hamilton (1967). “Philosophical Works”, p.527, Georg Olms Verlag

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Nature, Fighting, Science

  7 Copy quote

• Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.

  Reginald Punnett

  Knowledge, Mean, Science

  16 Copy quote

• [Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing - one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

  Paul Halmos

  Knowledge, Science, Analysis

  "Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics".

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Tree, Her Beauty, England

  Henry Ward Beecher (1868). “Norwood: Or, Village Life in New England”, p.5

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is wanted in architecture, as in so many things, is a man. ... One suggestion might be made-no profession in England has done its duty until it has furnished a victim. ... Even our boasted navy never achieved a great victory until we shot an admiral. Suppose an architect were hanged? Terror has its inspiration, as well as competition.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Inspiration, Men, Competition

  7 Copy quote

• If teaching has any purpose, it is to implant true insight and responsibility. Education must lead us from irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgement. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order.

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

  Teaching, Responsibility, Order

  88 Copy quote

• I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.

  Isaac Asimov

  Real, School, Library

  Isaac Asimov (2009). “I, Asimov: A Memoir”, p.54, Bantam

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Architecture in general is frozen music.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

  Design, Frozen

  'Philosophie der Kunst' (1809)

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

  Lord Byron

  School, Men, Two

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alvar Aalto

  Art, Design, Splits

  82 Copy quote

• To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

  Ai Weiwei

  Badass, Bad Ass, Criticism

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Life, Mean, Men

  Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Kaufmann, Ben Raeburn (1960). “Frank Lloyd Wright: writings and buildings”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.

  Oscar Niemeyer

  Badass, Bad Ass, Important

  "The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer". Book by Oscar Niemeyer, 1998.

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

  Michael Ende

  People, House, Design

  7 Copy quote

• There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

  Edwin Lutyens

  Greatness, Design, Patronage

  58 Copy quote