Construction Process Quotes

All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

You have to blast to build in Manhattan. And the buildings went up in Manhattan because of the power of that bedrock. Once you dig that foundation - and they dig with dynamite - and once you dynamite out and you secure that foundation, that building isn't going anywhere.

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

Demolition is a part of construction.

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

I love the construction process and it is always important because we try to experiment and do something new, so the builders are not copying any technique from other projects. Everything is innovative and so I need to be there and be attentive to make sure everything is running smoothly.

The stadium expansion is currently at the feasibility stage and has to go through that.

Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines.

It takes a lot of effort to make a building look effortless.

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.

Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.

The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.

Watching something being constructed, whether you're passing a building site or whether you're watching an artist at work, is fascinating, and I think that's the enjoyment.