I had a whistle-stop tour of Havana in a horse and carriage and couldn’t stop taking photographs of the decaying yet enchanting buildings and people.
It’s fascinating to go somewhere where you’re away from everything. There are no houses, no buildings, no roads, no people. And for a little less extreme hunting, any place in the West – Colorado, Utah, Montana – that’s just beautiful country.
I grew up in a big sky country. Then I lived in Manhattan, where you can only see the sky between buildings, and then I went into a building where you couldn’t see the sky at all. I didn’t like that so much.
I don’t want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik’s geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There’s big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.
When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.
Credit card companies pay college students generously to stand outside dining halls, dorms, and academic buildings and encourage their fellow students to apply for credit cards.
Most buildings, whether they’re Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time.
When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the ’20s and ’30s.
Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.
In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society.
I’ve always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that.
The lanes and streets of the city being set out, the choice of sites for the convenience and use of the state remains to be decided on; for sacred edifices, for the forum, and for other public buildings.
I’m in love with corrugated iron buildings, especially chapels and churches.
Buildings designed exclusively on scientific principles will depress their occupants and constrain their creativity.
You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.
I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
Barcelona is a beautiful city. I love the buildings and the architecture and always enjoy being close to that. It makes sense as an art person to work in places like that, it always feels nice and creative.
I was always fascinated by graphic art and typography and architecture. And so I was constantly cutting things and making blocks and making buildings out of shoeboxes.
Homes and buildings, many of which are old and drafty, eat up 40 percent of the energy America uses. Such inefficiencies perpetuate our reliance on foreign oil, imperiling our national security and increasing our contribution to climate change.
Route 192 is its own thing, and you can’t find that anywhere else. The colors and shapes of the buildings, the way that all the small businesses in a way feed off of the parks and sort of rip off the themes of Disney – you’re not going to find that anywhere else.
Alfriston is a compact village set around a rather traffic-weary High Street, mainly of old, timbered buildings. The principal sights lie to the east on the river side.
I’m really into architecture, I’m a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I’m a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.
Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice – or of an architect who didn’t bother to find out why buildings stand up?
It was when ’21’ came out. I was in Los Angeles and my face was everywhere: on buses, on posters, on the side of buildings. I didn’t feel that blown away by it. I was still hungry to prove myself. I realised that quite quickly, that I had to find something that challenged me from an acting point of view.
When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.
In Manchester, you don’t have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.
The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
It’s not like I am a junkie that wants to throw himself from very tall buildings, but some people are, and I love them kind of people.
There is much more to schools than buildings. There are academic activities, how it reaches the community and its proximity to other programs.
No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.
My office has a view of low-cost housing, old East German prefabricated apartment buildings. It isn’t an attractive view, but it’s very helpful, because it reminds me to ask myself, whenever there is a decision to be made, whether the people who live there can afford our decisions.
When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.
In Japan, there is less a culture of preserving old buildings than in Europe.
I want to design jewelry for girls and guys… I’ma spread it out, but I’ma design, probably when I’m just designing furniture and buildings, I’ll probably being the jewelry thing, too.
I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.
BASE jumping is skydiving from fixed objects, like buildings, antennae, bridges and earth – meaning mountains, cliffs. It’s for sure – for me – it’s the ultimate feeling of being in free fall, with all the visual references.
Chicago always hit me as such a gloomy place – I just remember all the snow getting dirty as soon as it would fall, all the decaying brown brick buildings around where we lived, all this soot all over the place.
You see these terrorists that are flying planes into buildings, right? You see our cities getting shot up in California. You see Paris getting shot up. And then somebody complains when a terrorist gets waterboarded, which quite frankly is no different than what happens on college campuses and frat houses every day.
Medieval and Tudor people didn’t treat buildings as a semi-disposable resource like we do.
You have to blast to build in Manhattan. And the buildings went up in Manhattan because of the power of that bedrock. Once you dig that foundation – and they dig with dynamite – and once you dynamite out and you secure that foundation, that building isn’t going anywhere.
But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.
Life here (in the Pacific Northwest, not in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland or the chain of buildings connecting them but in the rest of the place, out west and east from the north-south I-5 river) can sometimes feel like a half-dream, half-myth.
It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn’t use that kind of buildings and houses.
I don’t think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.
You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it’s compared to the present. I mean there’s a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.
Parents matter, buildings count, curriculum choices, materials, resources – all these things are important in a top-class education. But, in the end, it comes down to the teachers.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we tend to use technology to show our power: you know, we build high-rises, towers, big buildings that become symbols of power and capitalism. We don’t talk about how emotions and nature can be connected.
Often, architects work too hard trying to make their buildings look different. It’s like we’re actors let loose on a stage, all speaking our parts at the same time in our own private languages without an audience.
