Architecture Is Art Quotes & Sayings

I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling. — Brad Pitt

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs

I have seen the glories of art and architecture, and mountain and river; I have seen the sunset on the Jungfrau, and the full moon rise over Mont Blanc; but the fairest vision on which these eyes ever looked was the flag of my country in a foreign land. Beautiful as a flower to those who hate it, terrible as a meteor to those who hate it, it is the symbol of the power and glory, and the honor, of fifty million Americans. — George Frisbie Hoar

Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look - all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that's what excites me. — Tom Ford

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. — Michelangelo Buonarroti

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. — Bob Dylan

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful. — Frank Lloyd Wright

architecture is an art of the mind that will display in front of the eyes from others which can satisfy their needs — Jan Jansen

Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Architecture is a subtle and difficult art. It needs dedication and involves pain. Being able 'to architect' is not a capacity that can be developed to sophisticated levels quickly and easily. — Simon Unwin

The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery. — Marie-Antoine Careme

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before. — Ada Louise Huxtable

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions. — Susan Sontag

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos. — Lyall Watson

When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible. — Richard Meier

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures. — Maya Lin

Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing. — Renzo Piano

Fashion, art, and architecture are all so tightly connected; I think the way to approach referencing these art works is by capturing the essence. — Roksanda Ilincic

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? — Lance Olsen

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting. — Arne Jacobsen

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master. — David Josiah Brewer

Art is humanity's most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill, but a necessary part of communication. The quality of civilization can be measured through its music, dance, drama, architecture, visual art and literature. We must give our children knowledge and understanding of civilization's most profound works. — Ernest L. Boyer

A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co- creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not beenreached.Whether peopleare artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole. — Joseph Beuys

Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. — Sarah Parcak

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required. — Thom Mayne

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. — N.D. Wilson

Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature. — Jasna Horvat

Designed in a 'Pueblo Deco' style, which blends Mission with Art Deco influences, the DCA tower is a composite modeled after real Hollywood landmarks built in the 1920's; possible influences include the Hollywood Tower at 6200 Franklin Avenue, The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard and the Chateau Marmont at 8221 Sunset Boulevard. — Leslie Le Mon

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. — Rebecca Solnit

Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture. — John Howe

Architecture, either practically considered or viewed as an art of taste, is a subject so important and comprehensive in itself, that volumes would be requisite to do it justice. Buildings of every description, from the humble cottage to the lofty temple, are objects of such constant recurrence in every habitable part of the globe, and are so strikingly indicative of the intelligence, character, and taste of the inhabitants, that they possess in themselves a great peculiar interest for the mind. — Andrew Jackson Downing

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. — Arne Jacobsen

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes
for that is a sedentary task
than like one who destroys them ... But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order. — Claudio Magris

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us. — Alain De Botton

For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep. — Malcolm Forbes

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip ... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears ... — Arnold Schoenberg

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create - be it product, communication or system - is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do. — Maggie Macnab

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.
But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in. — Le Corbusier

I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

The thing about architecture is that it's an art [you] simply learn more by doing more. It's one of those things that is really not an art about thinking, but doing. So in a way, what it has done is greatly intensify the way that I build. — David Adjaye

I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential. — James Polshek

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure. — John Ruskin

As I explain at some length in 'The Crystal Sun' this particular angle, which we can call the 'golden angle,' is the precise value of the acute angle of of a right-angled 'golden triangle' that embodies the golden mean proportion ....

The Danish art historian Else Kielland established with conclusive and absolutely overwhelming evidence and analysis that this angle was the basis for all Egyptian art and architecture. She did this in her monumental work 'Geometry in Egyptian Art' .....

The King's Chamber inside the Great Pyramid embodies no fewer than eight occurrences of the golden angle, and the coffer in the chamber embodies yet more. — Robert K. G. Temple

The reason for the difference between the architectural and engineering 'climate', so to speak, is very complex. It is partly a matter of terminology, partly a matter of historical accident, and the consequent training of architects and engineers, and mostly a matter of what is commonly supposed to be the difference in content or context - architecture being concerned with producing works of art; engineering with utility structures. — Yanni Alexander Loukissas

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts — Joseph Addison

In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble. — Rem Koolhaas

It's always helpful to look outside of the web for your inspiration, to places where you might not at first expect to find a solution. The world is a collage of inspiration, from newspapers, magazine publishing, and advertising to product design, architecture and the fine arts. — Andy Clark

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Architecture is (in part) "the art of leaving out irrelevant details". Leaving out details, sadly, often derails into religiously ignoring details. The key word, however, is 'irrelevant': as the Chinese proverb says: people stumble over molehills, not over mountains. An architect consciously leaves out details that he or she has decided are irrelevant to the decisions to be made. — Gerben Wierda

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form. — George Hickenlooper

Less is more, in prose as in architecture. — Donald Hall

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way. — Sydney Pollack

Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon. — Bruno Zevi

[...] Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries. — Rene Guenon

Literature is painting, architecture, and music. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As much as the needs of fact, the needs of the spirit and the senses, must be satisfied. Architecture is as much a part of the realm of art as it is of technology; the fusion of thinking and feeling. — Harry Seidler

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up. — Frank Gehry

The Art Deco movement, architecture from that period and sort of the industrial aesthetic from that period. Art Deco meets tribal kind of thing. All that is my primal inspiration. — Pamela Love

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas. — Swami Vivekananda

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. — Trevor Paglen

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos - some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership. — Jim Highsmith

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art. — Thom Mayne

The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history (Geoffrey Jellicoe, Landscape of man) — Tom Turner

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law ... . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. - Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002 — Naomi Klein

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art. — John Lautner

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature. — Doug Aitken

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things. — Renzo Piano

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind ... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location ... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting. — Leonardo Da Vinci

When I'm in London, Claridge's is a great favourite. I'm a big fan of art deco architecture and the rooms are extraordinary. — Roman Coppola

There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through — Dan Rice

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives. — Bjarke Ingels

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down. — Charles Jencks

When experiencing a work of art, a curious exchange takes place; the work projects its aura, and we project our own emotions and precepts on the work. The melancholy in Michelangelo's architecture is fundamentally the viewer's sense of his/her own melancholy enticed by the authority of the work. Enigmatically, we encounter ourselves in the work. — Juhani Pallasmaa

The deepwood is vanished in these islands
much, indeed, had vanished before history began
but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history. — Robert Macfarlane

Every inch of land there is so contested," I observed, more to myself than to him. "How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art. — Margaret George

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago - just a couple of centuries - when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world's greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements. — Bruce Sheiman

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture's essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know. — Ada Louise Huxtable

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried. — Ada Louise Huxtable

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times. — Donald Judd

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together. — Alvar Aalto

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial. — Martin Filler

I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel

And that is why I would propose that, in our teaching of the humanities, we should emphasize the enduring creations of the past. The schools should stay as far from contemporary works as possible. Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own times - its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. Their knowledge of the form and content of these arts is by no means satisfactory. But their ignorance of the form and content of the art of the past is cavernous. — Neil Postman

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. — Titus Burckhardt

My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books. — Jude Deveraux

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. — Havelock Ellis

There is much to learn from architecture before it became an expert's art. — Bernard Rudofsky

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? — Stefan Zweig

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature. — James Freeman Clarke

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space. — Philip Johnson

I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being. — Luis Barragan

Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world. — Peter Zumthor

I have an architecture degree; that's what my college degree is in. And that sucked. I started doing Web and CD-ROM development really early on, and then that grew into being an art director and doing advertising work. — Jonathan Hickman

Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first. — Havelock Ellis