Architectural Innovation Quotes

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

O America! Because you build for mankind I build for you.

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth

Today, architecture is invention. It isn't enough to just be rational - It must also be beautiful.

I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible.

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

I have always tried to create bridges that are more than a connecting structure - places in their own right.

We want our buildings to work like a machine that will create a pleasurable environment.

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

Frank Gehry designs buildings that make other architects half his age (he's 78) gasp with envy. Neotony is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance in his head.

Architecture is the work of nations

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" Yes." My dear fellow, who will let you?" That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder. You need to be a militant, you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.

Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now—our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.

America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums.

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

I've always been interested in combining architecture with a social agenda, and I really think you can invest and be inventive with hospitals and housing.

Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.