Architectural Critique Quotes

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow - shopping centers, airports - it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture.

The great pyramid is overrated. It's a bad design. The lounge is going to be huge, but the bedroom is going to be tiny.

Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.

Throughout the ages it has always been possible to point to good and bad architecture.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.

It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.' ... It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.

The World Trade Center was for me not only out of scale vertically, but it was also out of scale in plan. It occupied several blocks that were all massed together.

Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.

I started to draw buildings. I called them Proposed Colossal Monuments - they weren't for real, not for actual building. It was more a critique of architecture.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses.

To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough.