Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.
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.
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.
If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.
It's so easy for me to get caught up in the feeling of a city like Venice, where everything is just beautiful color and gorgeous buildings that are so peaceful. You can roam around and get lost in the labyrinth.
As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.
You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.
Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.
London imbued me with an appreciation of the beauty and value of history in general. As it has evolved and grown, the city has created iconic modern buildings that look perfect as they sit alongside ancient ones.
We're seeing the development of tactics in Iraq, such as suicide bombing. Insurgents have been driving cars with explosives into hotels and office buildings. The recruitment may be even more prolific outside Iraq.
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.
If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think.
Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.
Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don't quite fit the bill. They don't march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our streets of crime.
My idea is to fill an intersection with color. That will include the road and the sidewalk and up the building, so there's a cubic volume of color in the intersection wedged between four corners and four buildings.
When terrorists attacked the symbols of our national unity and strength, they failed to realize that they were just symbols of our strength. The real strength of our nation comes from our people - not our buildings.
The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.
Extreme weather threatens our energy and electric grid, federal buildings, transportation infrastructure, access to natural resources, public health, our relationships across the globe, and many other aspects of life.
From the early days of European migration to America, in the 17th Century, the prototype of buildings was based on English precedent, even if mostly translated into the locally available material in abundance: timber.
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
NASA is an utterly fascinating place, and the fact that the buildings look so anonymous almost makes it more fascinating. You walk by a generic office-park-looking building, and you have no idea what's going on inside.
I'm not afraid of flying; I just fear I'm going to die. I think I'm - vulnerable. I admit it. I don't fly. I got claustrophobia. I don't go in high buildings. I don't do those things. I'm just myself, whatever that is.
The sensors have many potential practical uses - in Government buildings, train carriages, cargo containers, on a soldier's lapel - and are a thousand times cheaper than current sensors that are used for the same purpose.
Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.
My father is an architect, so I often think like a designer or an architect. I remember when I was admiring buildings, I would look up at them and see this perspective and this awesome power of the monument in front of me.
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.
Dubai is a vibrant city: Big cars, big buildings... it reminds me of my home town, Hong Kong. People are always on the move here, and there's a lot going on. There are some wonderful architecture and some not-so-wonderful.
We were already, in 1981, bemoaning the fact that people were using certain accessorised ideas and images that they connected with us - sort of strange buildings and neo-fascist regimes and the 'dark side' of human culture.
The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.
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.
I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.
I got my first job the old-fashioned way: I took an elevator to the top floor of many buildings and walked down floor by floor on the stairs going into every firm and asking the receptionist if she knew of any jobs available.
Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.
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.
What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.
If there were a major earthquake in Los Angeles, with bridges and highways and railroads and airports all shut down and huge buildings collapsing, I don't care how much planning you do, the first 72 hours is going to be chaotic.
I'm a bad customer for my own buildings! If I'm choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!
Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.
The Bar Room has a corner table placed strategically at a point diagonally across from the entrance. the table of tables in the setting of settings in the building of buildings. In the religion of lunch, this is the holy of holies.
New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it's just one - a really rich one - with big tall glass buildings.
He was mostly leaping tall buildings in the beginning. There were cases where he would leap off a tall building or swoop down, and at that point he would look like he was flying, I suppose. It was just natural to draw him like that.
All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.
Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.
Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.
We remember the heroes who ran into the burning buildings to rescue those trapped inside, and the dauntless passengers on Flight 93 who laid down their lives to save others, including almost certainly those of us in the U.S. Capitol.
Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world.
You could spend your time with your nose buried in a guidebook, but Amsterdam really is best explored on foot, so you can stumble upon the city's hidden gems. The architecture and the beauty of some of the buildings is also wonderful.
I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg - that's me - into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn't fit.