#architecture

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom. ↗

— Jonathan Raban

#citizenship #inspirational #sustainability #architecture

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. ↗

— John Adams

#politics #architecture

[The building] had been designed by an architect, so it bore little resemblance to any normal structure. ↗

— Gary Corby

#humor #architecture

As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost. ↗

— Harry von Zell

#been #charged #cost #designer #mission

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city. ↗

— Alvar Aalto

#city #concentrate #daily #daily work #functions

Less is more. ↗

— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

#less #less is more #more

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#architecture

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#houses #identity #architecture

There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor. ↗

— Keith Bellows

#heart #india #architecture

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#creativity #architecture