architecture quotes

24 quotes

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.

David Byrne

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Bob Dylan

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

John Ruskin

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

John Ruskin

I call architecture frozen music.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

John Ruskin

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

John Ruskin

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

John Ruskin

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

Bill Gates

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

David Byrne

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

John Ruskin

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Ernest Hemingway

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Winston Churchill

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Salvador Dali

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

George Lucas

Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys.

Christopher Columbus

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Thomas Carlyle

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

Coco Chanel

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

Henry David Thoreau