To me, a building – if it’s beautiful – is the love of one man, he’s made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.
The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.
I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.
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.
Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women’s movement.
There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.
A film carries six fine arts – it consists of architecture, painting, music, writing or literature, photography and performance. It’s a conjecture of all these things and yet based on literature.
Architecture is my work, and I’ve spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.
‘Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto’ is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.
A house is a machine for living in.
There’s a very important aspect to all my work, now more than ever, which is tying the interior design and architecture with the art.
Architecture is invention.
I am but an architectural composer.
The show is called ‘The Office,’ and while it focuses on the people, the architecture of the space is very important.
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
New York is just an energy. There’s a beauty to the way it’s laid out: the architecture, the way the planning is. It’s huge, but you really do get to experience more than your own existence here. It’s kinda hard to isolate yourself from different types of people, different types of ideas or communities.
The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.
One of the dilemmas of architecture in general is that there is a Catch-22 – you can’t actually get to be commissioned to do certain types of building until you’ve already built that type of building. So it seems to be incredibly hard to get going.
Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.
I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.
When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I’d move in and sell the previous one – so on and so forth.
I don’t see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
Architecture is a negotiated art, and it’s highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.
For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can’t in larger projects.
I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission… (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.
When I started designing in school, I discovered that I had a knack for it. I fell completely in love with architecture, and I remain in love with it.
Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.
Music, architecture and pictures have always been my passions, and all that material wealth has meant for me, is being able to have some of the pictures I liked.
Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.
Architecture remains a passion and a subject I’m very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it.
‘Clothespin’ was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.
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.
Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
I could have been an architect, but I don’t think I’d have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.
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.
Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It’s very tough.
In architecture, Palladio is the game. It means hard thought all through – if it is labored, it fails.
Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it’s really difficult.
The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.
I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.
The original Heart logo was made back in the real early ’70s by Mike Fisher, who I used to be in a relationship with. He was first our manager and then our soundman. When I met him, he was in design school for architecture, so he was always drawing.
I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it’s different – even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.
I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.
I’m drawn to furniture design as complete architecture on a minor scale.
I’ve always known I wanted to be in design somehow. It was going to be architecture, but I would’ve had to quit acting for it. I realized with horology, I could learn at my own pace.
Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.
When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, ‘Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?’ Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.
It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.
In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.
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 think architecture has to be a gift.
I wanted to be a pilot, but I was always drawing bodies. When I realised I wanted to pursue something creative, my parents pushed me towards architecture.
I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture.
The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.
The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It’s a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.
People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.
Chicago’s one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts – understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that’s changing the whole story.
The way we do our architecture is to show that we can come up with our own solutions. We don’t just take orders.