architecture
Architecture must make a strong emotional impact on man. I have come to the conviction that once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message.
Eero Saarinen on His Work, Aline Saarinen, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 10.
It has been said that were I three inches taller than 5' 8½" all my houses would have been quite different in proportion. Probably.
Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), 141.
I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldn’t have done anywhere near such a good job.
“World Man,” Kenneth Stone Kassler Memorial Lecture, Princeton University School of Architecture, October 5, 1966.
What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don’t understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.
Said to a journalist, February 14, 1953, in Eero Saarinen on His Work, Aline Saarinen, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 9.
I know when I was a kid we used to throw the football out of a first-floor window. We never went to a play space; the play space began immediately. Play was inspired, not organized.
Louis I. Kahn: Conversations with Students, 2nd ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 23.
Is anything more pleasurable to the mind than unsullied paper? The studious comparisons and selection of “stock” in textures and colors of cards and paper?
Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), 36.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that amazing revolution in tumult and splendor of sound built on four tones based upon a rhythm a child could play on the piano with one finger. Supreme imagination reared the four repeated tones, simple rhythms, into a great symphonic poem that is probably the noblest thought-built edifice in our world.
Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), 348.
I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best.
“Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson,” by Aaron Shattuck and Gary Stix, Scientific American, August 26, 2011.
I stand in the street and watch the house and take some photographs, apologetic Parisians ducking past me. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in a landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 22.
Solid wood has almost disappeared as too expensive, complicated and old-fashioned. I reintroduced it as a construction method here because it feels good to be with, to be in. You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin—the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn’t steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it’s hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it’s cold, the other way around. So I preserved the wood-beam construction because of what it can do for your body.
“The Ascension of Peter Zumthor,” by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2011.
The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.
The Moviegoer (New York: Vintage International Edition, 1998), 14.
There is as emphatically a morality expressed in Babylonian architecture or Baroque architecture as if it were plastered all over with Biblical texts. Now in the same manner there is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about.
“In the Country of Skelt,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol 18 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1991), 53.