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Architecture Quotes

“She gasped. “You know what your problem is? You don’t take yourself… or anything… seriously enough!” She sat rigidly, her teeth and her buttocks clenched tight, nostrils flaring with each impassioned breath, tears burning the back of her eyelids. Was she really having this debate with Bruce Koczynski? A man she believed incapable of these intense opinions and complex ideas? She didn’t even know he had the vocabulary. It was utterly disorienting.”

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Author:M. A. Clarke Scott
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“One can speak best through stories. Things only come alive in this way. This is because such things are the children of our experiences. They are conceived during big events in our lives, born when we begin to reflect on those incidents and then grow with us as our appreciation for the memories that brought them into being also lives and thrives.”

ImaginationFantasyChildhoodMemoryArchitectureNostalgiaMiddle EastAutobiographyBiographyPlaces
Book:A Childhood Between Rivers and Mountains
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“In Faërie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose – an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king – that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not – unless it was built before our time.”

ImaginationFantasyArchitectureFaeriePresent DayTolkien
Book:The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
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“In any case, the expression ‘real life’ in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more ‘real’ than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist! For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more ‘real’ than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn. From the wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railway-engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do.”

InspirationalImaginationCreativityFantasyArchitectureTolkienNorse Mythology
Book:The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
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“The pursuit of beauty. The word is hard to articulate. As soon as you open your moth, it flies off, like a bird of paradise. Beauty can not be caught, but we are obliged to reach for it. Beauty is not neutral; pursuing it is a political act. Building is a grand act, a gesture toward peace, the opposite of destruction.”

IdeasImaginationBeautyCreativityDesignBuildingArchitectureCraftsmanship
Book:Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty
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“The pursuit of beauty. The word is hard to articulate. As soon as you open your mouth, it flies off, like a bird of paradise. Beauty can not be caught, but we are obliged to reach for it. Beauty is not neutral; pursuing it is a political act. Building is a grand act, a gesture toward peace, the opposite of destruction.”

IdeasImaginationBeautyCreativityDesignBuildingPerfectionArchitectureAtlantis
Book:Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty
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“It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us; the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome and hospitality. The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations.”

BuildingRomanticArchitectureDesignerArchitectJuhanipallasmaa
Book:The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
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“I'm not a religious believer, yet despite that I go to church. I love the architecture, the music, the words of the Bible, and the sense of sharing something profound with other people. I have long found deep spiritual peace in the great cathedrals, as do many millions of people, believers and nonbelievers alike.”

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Book:Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals
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“...Originally everything about a Greek or Christian building meant something, and in reference to a higher order of things. This atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness hung about the building like a magic veil. Beauty entered the system only secondarily, impairing the basic feeling of uncanny sublimity, of sanctification by magic or the gods' nearness. At the most, beauty tempered the dread - but this dread was the prerequisite everywhere. What does the beauty of a building mean to us now? The same as the beautiful face of a mindless woman: something masklike.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as moments of life 'concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a play of events' -- but that also necessary entailed the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art, the abolition of politics, and the fall of the 'spectacle-commodity economy.”

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Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
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“Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.”

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Book:Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design
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“خانه ها مخزن های پیچیده ی حیرت آوری هستند. آنچه پی بردم، در نهایت شگفتی من، این است هر چه در جهان رخ می دهد، هر چه کشف یا ساخته می شود، در نهایت به شکلی به خانه های ما راه می یابد. جنگ ها، قحطی ها، انقلاب صنعتی، عصر روشنگری، همه ی آن ها در کاناپه ها و قفسه های شما، در چین های پرده ها، در نرمی کرک های بالش شما، در رنگ های دیوارها و در آب لوله های خانه های شما وجود دارند. به این دلیل تاریخ زندگی خانواده آن طور که من کمابیش تصور کرده بودم، فقط تاریخ تخت خواب ها و کاناپه ها و اجاق های آشپزخانه نیست؛ بلکه تاریخ اسکوبرت و کود مرغ دریایی و برج ایفل و ساس و دزدیدن جسد و درباره ی هر چیز دیگری است که تاکنون رخ داده است. خانه مکانی برای فرار از تاریخ نیست؛ بلکه جایی است که تاریخ به آن جا منتهی می شود.”

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Book:At Home: A Short History of Private Life
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“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”

ArtBeautyArchitectureConservatismModernityCathedralsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Nor is it only as a sign of greater gentleness or refinement of mind, but as a proof of the best possible direction of this refinement, that the tendency of the Gothic to the expression of vegetative life is to be admired. That sentence of Genesis, 'I have given thee every green herb for meat,' like all the rest of the book, has a profound symbolical as well as literal meaning. It is not merely the nourishment of the body, but the food of the soul, that is intended. The green herb is, of all nature, that which is most essential to the healthy spiritual life of man. Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men, — perhaps their power is greatest. over those who are unaccustomed to them. But trees and fields and flowers were made for all, and are necessary for all. God has connected the labour which is essential to the bodily sustenance with the pleasures which are healthiest for the heart; and while He made the ground stubborn, He made its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair. The proudest architecture that man can build has no higher honour than to bear the image and recall the memory of that grass of the field which is, at once, the type and the support of his existence; the goodly building is then most glorious when it is sculptured into the likeness of the leaves of Paradise; and the great Gothic spirit, as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the waters, — but like her in this also, 'Lo, in her mouth was an olive branch, plucked off.”

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Book:On Art and Life
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“Great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.”

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Book:On Art and Life
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“The grand purpose of the classically built environment, ultimately, is to propel us out of our finite selves and into the limitlessness of the divine cosmos, to shatter our pretenses and present to us a whole new way of thinking about the meaning of life itself.”

BeautyHarmonyHumanismArchitectureWell BeingTranscendenceItalian RenaissanceWestern PhilosophySacred SpacesClassical Design
Book:Reclaiming Classical Design: Reflections on the Harmonious and Beautiful Building
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“History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.”

WarHumanityArchitecture
Author:Thomas B. Costain
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“It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive. I don’t blame children for fleeing those House Beautiful houses, nonshelters, dehumanized, ostentatious, rarely expressing an individual family’s way of life. When I was writing a column for Family Circle I had planned one in praise of shabbiness. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. It all comes back to the fact that we're not asked to be perfect, only human. What a relief it is to walk into a human house!”

Life And LivingArchitecture
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“The burden of my argument is that to set oneself up like this in such a defeatingly vast and intimidatingly inhuman structure is merely to announce the coming to rest of one's progress, and without that we are lost." "Di burdin ov mi argumint is dat 2 set Iself up like dis in such a defeetinly vast & intimidaytinly inhumin structyir is meerly 2 anounce di cumin 2 rest ov 1s progress, & witout dat we r lost.”

PhilosophyWisdomHumanityTechnologyProgressSocietyFutureScience FictionArchitectureExistentialism
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“Sometimes a house wants to be your mother. Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.”

HomeHouseArchitecture
Book:Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays
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“It is ridiculous to lay down to people where a thing should stand, design everything for them from the lavatory pan to the ashtray. On the contrary, I like people to move their furniture so that it suits them (not me!), and it's quite natural (and I approve) when they bring the old pictures and mementos they have come to love into a new interior, irrespective of whether they are good taste or bad.”

HomeStyleDesignArchitectureInterior DesignGood Taste
Author:Adolf Loos
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“But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

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Author:Herman Melville
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