100 Quotes About Architecture

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition — tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city — an old city, like London — underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly — past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors. There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.' I thought I'd find you here, ' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know, ' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead, ' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.'' What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted, ' he said.' I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.' That information is classified, I'm afraid.'1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.' Is it open to the public?' I said.' Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.' Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly, ' he said.' But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.' I hope you'll excuse me, ' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall. . Donna Tartt

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men. Thomas Hardy

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth. Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body. . Gloria Steinem

For me, it does not 'miss' if (the Potteries Thinkbelt study) goes into the archive, not as an example of how railway carriages can be used for teaching, but as one of the most powerful question marks ever placed against the architecture of university education. Roy Landau

(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ...project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion. Roy Landau

Beautiful building, ” Phoebe said. Sam nodded. “Classical Revival, ” he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have learned about building styles and understand what Classical Revival meant. They could have intelligent discussions about things like rooflines and columns. Jennifer McMahon

Spaces that at first may appear to reflect a simple condition are much more complex when the actions of individuals and groups are factored in. These unique patterns of movement through space can and should guide the architecture we build to serve them. For space only becomes truly public when people recognize it and utilize it as such. Great public space cannot be built as much as curated; it is architecture's responsibility to craft space in response to specific needs and unique practices. . it is not the space itself that is meaningful; it is the way space facilitates diversity, interaction, and new negotiations that makes it meaningful [David Adjaye, "Djemaa El-Fnaa, Marrakech: Engaging with Complexity and Diversity"]. Catie Marron

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. Thomas B. Costain

Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature. Jasna Horvat

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us. Alain De Botton

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. Michelangelo Buonarroti

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further. Unknown

Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture. James C. Snyder

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. Maggie Macnab

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared. Arthur Erickson

Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy. Unknown

Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped. Fritjof Capra

We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us Lois Farfel Stark

You are my other self Dagara Tribe Member

Like a spider in its web, a vibration anywhereis felt everywhere. Lois Farfel Stark

SEE what you think. Lois Farfel Stark

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking. Lynn Margulis

Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking Lois Farfel Stark

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.(b) “Objective” work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria. Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation – a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel. El Lissitzky

We will feel conviction about the things we create only if we keep discovering, within those creations, new reasons for wanting them to be that way. William L. Hubbard

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity. I.M. Pei

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building. John Ruskin

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture.- Look, - said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns — what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood — when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why? . Ayn Rand

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry. Vitruvius Pollio

I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the earth, I see –– architects and earthquakes - empaths and robots - fictions and near misses - lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming. I see us - trying on ways of being - so sweet and messy, so worthwhile. Laurie Perez

Thus nature provides a system for proportioning the growth of plants that satisfies the three canons of architecture. All modules are isotropic and they are related to the whole structure of the plant through self-similar spirals proportioned by the golden mean. Jay Kappraff

We therefore find that the triangles and rectangles herein described, enclose a large majority of the temples and cathedrals of the Greek and Gothic masters, for we have seen that the rectangle of the Egyptian triangle is a perfect generative medium, its ratio of five in width to eight in length 'encouraging impressions of contrast between horizontal and vertical lines' or spaces; and the same practically may be said of the Pythagorean triangle . Samuel Colman

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else."" Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us, " he said. "But they made it a virtue. Anthony Ryan

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Thelonious Monk

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible, I shall avoid the expression of any opinion as to the objective truth or falsehood of the systems of theological speculation of which I may find occasion to speak. From my present point of view, theology is regarded as a natural product of the operations of the human mind, under the conditions of its existence, just as any other branch of science, or the arts of architecture, or music, or painting are such products. Like them, theology has a history. Like them also, it is to be met with in certain simple and rudimentary forms; and these can be connected by a multitude of gradations, which exist or have existed, among people of various ages and races, with the most highly developed theologies of past and present times. . Thomas Henry Huxley

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable. Ayn Rand

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction Umair Siddiqui

I don't know who you are, " she thought, "but whoever you are, you're one hell of a player. Jeffrey Eaton

The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized. . Mark Wigley

Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us. Leslie Weisman

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar Henry David Thoreau

Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society. I.M. Pei

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls. Dean Koontz

Even a brick wants to be something. A brick wants to be something. It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is. Louis Kahn

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside! Unknown

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships. Sharon Salzberg

Modern architecture predominately specializes in designing what are essentially dimly lit caves. Steven Magee

How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its altering realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision, has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogeneous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly turned for twilight rather than bright daylight. . Juhani Pallasmaa

And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe, I continued, and then I broke off for Walter's sake. Peter Ackroyd

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang–which is the most favored city in the country–every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction, ' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now. Christopher Hitchens

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain. Alain De Botton

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it. Ludwig Wittgenstein

I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town. Banana Yoshimoto

They swore by concrete. They built for eternity. Unknown

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life. When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva. Antal Szerb

The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal-opportunity for all men, except for black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks. Robin Boyd

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city, ' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. Rebecca Solnit

Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger. Willa Cather

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing.. and the Gospel according to St. Thomas.. was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. G.k. Chesterton

I don't know what London's coming to – the higher the buildings the lower the morals. Unknown

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya. Judith Clancy

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. Kevin McCloud

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. Adolf Loos

Home development is about wishful thinking. It's about capturing a dream. Barbara Delinsky

Old buildings whisper to us in the creaking of floorboards and rattling of windowpanes. Fennel Hudson

That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles. Geoff Manaugh

Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors. Geoff Manaugh

It is my trade, " he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city Janet Frame

It may well be that what we have hithertounderstood as architecture, and what we arebeginning to understand of technology, areincompatible disciplines. The architect whoproposes to run with technology knows nowthat he will be in fast company, and that inorder to keep up he may have to discard hiswhole cultural load, including the professionalgarments by which he is recognized as anarchitect. If, on the other hand, he decides notto do this, he may find that a technologicalculture has decided to go on without him. Rener Banham

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman. . Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk. . Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground. . Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law. Georgius Agricola

I’m relieved to seethat even brilliant physicists make mistakes.” Kohler looked over. “What do you mean?”“ Whoever wrote that note made a mistake. That column isn’t Ionic. Ionic columns are uniform in width. That one’s tapered. It’s Doric–the Greek counterpart. A common mistake.” Kohler did not smile. “The author meant it as a joke, Mr. Langdon. Ionic means containing ions–electrically charged particles. Most objects contain them. Dan Brown

At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times. I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture. I.M. Pei

I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there’s something interesting behind it. Kate Morton

It was——how shall I put it?——a painfully solitary building. Let me explain. Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life form that had evolved blindly, toward who knows what end. . Haruki Murakami

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land. Leon Krier

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources. Leon Krier

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop. Leon Krier

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains. Leon Krier

Page 158: 'Architecture is team work, ' said Sinan. 'Apprenticeship is not.'' Why don't you want us to look at each other's drawings? ' Jahan once asked.' Because you'll compare. If you think you are better than the others, you'll be poisoned by hubris. If you think another's better, poisoned by envy. Either way, it is poison. Unknown

It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester] Owen Hatherley

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space. Louis Khan

The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be. Hugh Ferriss

The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble. Christopher Wren

..but there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall, 4) That the miseries (If the present Life, and the Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game. Why, do we not believe the very Infants to be the Heirs of Hell and Children of the Devil as soon as they are disclos'd to the World? I declare that I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghil Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature. I have only room to add: there is a mad-drunken Catch, Hey ho! The Devil is dead! If that be true, I have been in the wrong Suit all my Life. Peter Ackroyd

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) . Alain De Botton

Modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media. Beatriz Colomina

Every city is a ghost. New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park. Libba Bray

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184) Alain De Botton

When the great sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan would start building a new mosque, he would make sure both the design and the project were in harmony with the city's history and the city's spirit [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"]. Catie Marron