Ecological Design Quotes

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

I've become really interested in permaculture, simplifying my life and doing everything I can to develop more of a sustainable lifestyle.

The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet. We don't know what details of a truly sustainable future are going to be like, but we need options, we need people experimenting in all kinds of ways and permaculturists are one of the critical gangs that are doing that.

We need to be both conscious and competent to design products that emulate nature's life cycles, making sure that they endure and are either recycled or absorbed.

When you build a beautiful building, people love it. And the most sustainable building in the world is the one that’s loved.

Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.

Biomimicry is … the conscious emulation of life’s genius.

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.

We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.

What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet.

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

My husband and I are building a 'green' house in Santa Ynez Valley. We bought 15 acres and we're going to build a house that's green from the ground up.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

We have to change from 'ego-architecture' to 'eco-architecture.'

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.

We can plant a house, we can build a tree.

Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand