Architecture Quotes

"Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required."

"Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates."

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

"When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt."

"The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well."

"Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way."

"I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music."

"Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend... they can all go drifting by unseen if you're not careful."

"I taught at Princeton for 39 years, and the school of architecture on the campus is the worst building on the campus."

"I don't really get into architecture in the hotel room. But maybe a little Feng Shui here and there."

"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."

"In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives."

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

"Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life."

"Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that."

"When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, 'Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?' Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical."

"If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress."

"Architecture is about public space held by buildings."

"As a student, I hadn't really been interested in architecture at all, but when I started teaching, it grew into me - rather than me growing into it."

"Infrastructure is much more important than architecture."

"The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response."

"The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film - whether it's history, psychology, economics, or architecture - so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn't going to help you unless you have something to say."

"The 'International Style of Modernism' came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet."

"Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful."