A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Architects and urbanists are fascinated with cities that are shrinking, like the Rust Belt cities. Or, alternatively, we are fascinated with the growth of favelas and informal settlements. The 2008 financial crisis made these changes more extreme. The subtraction protocols rehearse a way of thinking about multiple properties in counterbalancing interdependence - not just the shaping of one property but the ratcheting interplay between properties.”
“Architects are by nature and pursuit, leaders and teachers.”
“Architects are mostly self-centered and their buildings express their ego. [They are] not social buildings to make it more comfortable for people - to make life better for people. The cities have to be designed so people can get together and talk with one another.”
“Architects are now on the look for materials and substances that can enhance biodiversity and rewild living systems.”
“Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.”
“Architects are the new comedians.”
“Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to "think outside the box." Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?”
“Architects cannot teach nature anything.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Architects design houses. I live in a home.”
“Architects everywhere have recognized the need of ... a tool which may be put in the hands of creators of form, with the simple aim ... of making the bad difficult and the good easy.”
“Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it. Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining.”
“Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.”
“Architects have to dream, we have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well.”
“Architects in Kochi - G FACTREE Architects”
“Architects in planning rooms today have forgotten their faith in natural light. Depending on the touch of a finger to a switch, they are satisfied with static light and forget the endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.”
“Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.”
“Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.”
“Architects love to rethink a project - that's what we do. If something is successful, like a house or a kettle, in this case, it's a great compliment when someone wants another one.”
“Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power. Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters.”
“Architects must have a razor-sharp sense of individuality.”
“Architects need to restore and protect.”
“Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.”
“Architects see the world a certain way, and cooks see and smell the world a certain way. [Dancing ] is always been my lens, what I use to see.”
“Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens”
“Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.”
“Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.”
“Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.”
“Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.”
“Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.”
“Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.”
Source: Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure
“Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit . . .”
“Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
“Architectural and product designs have a narrative capacity - you can start to tell a story about them and imagine a lot of things.”
“Architectural drawing is a language with conventions where the rules can be deliberately misused; a well-composed architectural drawing can both contain correct and incorrect arrangements of meaningful things.”
“Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part.”
“Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.”
“Architectural-form equals social-form”
“Architecture
is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it,
we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the
human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstandin g and provide a
beautiful context for life's drama.”
Source: Frank O. Gehry: Selected Works : 1969 to Today
“Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.”
Source: Val D'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art Directly Antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories
“Architecture aims at Eternity”
Source: The City Churches, Vestry Minutes and Churchwardens' Accounts: St Mary's, Ingestre, Staffordshire; All Saints' and Sessions House, Northampton; the Royal Hospital, Chelsea; the Church and Almshouses, Farley, Wiltshire; the Sheldonian Theatre and Tom Tower, Oxford; the Market House, Abingdon, Berkshire; the Bridge, St. John's College, Cambridge; the New School, Eton; Kensington Palace; the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Morden and Bromley Colleges; and the Five Tracts on Architecture by Sir Chr. Wren. Drawings, Engravings and Photographs ...
“Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.”
“Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it.”
“Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?”
“Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.”
Source: Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture
“Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.”
“Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall.
The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.”
“Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.”
“Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.”
“Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.”
“Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.”
Source: Why Architecture Matters