Quotes about Architecture
I have no requirements for a style of architecture.
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.
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.
In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
I don't believe in morality in architecture.
The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.
For my first apartment, when I was first married, I went to the lumberyard and bought stuff and made couches. My then-wife made cushions. I was really very interested in furniture. I was in school for architecture, but I had to live, and making furniture was different from designing buildings, which I couldn't do for myself.
I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.
I taught at Princeton for 39 years, and the school of architecture on the campus is the worst building on the campus.
You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.
The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
I practised as an architect for 10 years. I qualified in 1973 with a fellowship diploma of architecture. World Series Cricket gave me the freedom to go out and pursue architecture.
About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.
I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
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.
In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.
Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.
As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.
I love art in general - architecture, anything creative.
Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.
Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
