Building Design Quotes & Sayings

We never could design a building as beautiful as the trees. — Pietro Belluschi

When building a complex system, having crackerjack programmers (who can make any design work, even a bad one) can be a liability. The result, after lots of effort, is a working system that cannot be easily maintained or upgraded. Good -but not great- programmers would fail early, causing a realization that the system must be redesigned, and then reimplemented. The extra cost is paid once, early in the system's cycle (when it is cheap), instead of repeatedly paid late in the system's cycle (when it is more expensive). — Richard E. Pattis

Firstly, we analysis your competitors and then helps you to raise your level by building the most effective website design and optimization which is suitable to your business site. This is a very necessary task to increase the ranking of your website. — Mark Batty

I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future. — Jack Dangermond

Creation offers proof (for those willing to accept it) of a powerful "Someone" behind the natural world. The astronomical odds against this world happening merely by chance provide insurmountable evidence for a Creator. The intricate beauty and complex design of the creation - from subatomic particles and the molecular building blocks of life to galaxies and the expanses of the universe - demonstrate that a "Designer" planned it all. — Anonymous

What it does, that other resources do not, is gather under one cover a body of broadly applicable design principles, coupled with practical ideas and suggestions for making specific instruments. If you are interested in exploring instrumental sound, building something musical from scratch, or composing and performing with anything other than the usual commercially made instruments, then you will be glad to have the information provided here. So will anyone, for that matter, who simply wants to better understand musical sound. Acoustical — Bart Hopkin

A profound design process eventually makes the patron, the architect, and every occasional visitor in the building a slightly better human being. — Juhani Pallasmaa

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The — Andrew S. Grove

We didn't push it down people's throats ... One turned into three in a short period of time. I built the first one and ... one day someone walked in and said "You know, I really like the design on this. Who built that?" I said "I did." He goes "Well, would you be interested in building me one?" I went "Yeah, I'll do that." — Drew Waters

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair. — Michael Graves

The space within becomes the reality of the building. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human designt, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry ... Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe. — Milan Kundera

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental. — Herbert Muschamp

We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media. — David Chipperfield

The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together. — Iain McGilchrist

I don't think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn't occur to most people that everything is designed
that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that's a nice ambition. — Bill Moggridge

No foreign architect of stature, such as I. M. Pei, resides in Japan. Foreign architects come to Japan on short-term contracts, erect a skyscraper or a museum, and then leave. But subtle and sophisticated approaches to services and design - the core elements of modern building technology - cannot be transmitted in this way. Japan is left with the empty shells of architectural ideas, the hardware without the software. — Alex Kerr

Trying to find my way around the Rayburn building is always a challenge. Combining my poor sense of direction with a confusing design is not good. — Gregg Harper

It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion. — Ada Louise Huxtable

We shouldn't just look at new buildings but at existing stock building because that's an even greater problem than the new buildings being built. The renovation of existing buildings and making them green is just as important as designing new green buildings. — Ken Yeang

I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it ... the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me, I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality. — Peter Zumthor

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. — Renzo Piano

By skimping on design, the owner gets costlier equipment, higher energy costs, and a less competitive and comfortable building; the tenants get lower productivity and higher rent and operating costs. — Amory Lovins

Foundational design principles regarding aesthetics, symbolism and meaning of place were for the old-timer carpenter, simply routine.
Unfortunately, these principles began to lose their footing in the late 1800s, when building practices shifted toward more commercial technologies. — Shannon Taylor Scarlett

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design. — Freeman Dyson

When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities. — Peter Zumthor

The tragic effects of terrorism have forced the new-construction industry to re-evaluate traditional methods of fire protection in commercial infrastructures. That includes everything from building codes, to structural design issues and the less durable fireproofing materials currently specified for commercial steel structures. — Craig Scott

The debut show, "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary," is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There's good work here, but much of what's on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building [of Museum of Arts and Design], too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement. — Jerry Saltz

I don't like the idea that the first preparation when you start to design your building has to put your label. I think this is not fair. It's not fair to the building or to the people, to the client, because every building tells a different story. — Renzo Piano

While non of us understands the Grand Design, we can commit to using all our experiences, good or bad, as the building blocks of a powerful and loving life. Then it is, indeed, all happening perfectly. — Susan Jeffers

When I design a building, I'm making sure you and I can get to the front door, there's enough of a threshold for entry, and that the rooms are in a logical sequence. — Michael Graves

Green Giant contained a very strong and clear site and building design concept. Green Giant had strong formal, aesthetic and programmatic concepts, coupled with a good understanding and incorporation of 2030 Palette design strategies. — Edward Mazria

We are constantly immersed in a network of signs and symbols whose meaning eludes us, but which, if only we could read them, would reveal every detail of our past and even predict our future. Like anticipatory echoes, they tingle in our consciousness, building in crescendo until the event they herald becomes fully manifest. Afterwards, they linger for a time before being drowned out by a new tide of signs rushing in upon us. Such signatures are everywhere... — Linda Lappin

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical. — Michael Ende

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Give it time. An exercise program such as yoga is a slow process. It is slow by design. But, in order to secure the gains and add to them, you have to keep it up. And guess what, the more you do it, the more your desire to do it grows. It is the same with building core spiritual muscles. You may have a period of intense growth - perhaps some adversity that drives you to your knees and calls forth the blessings of heaven. But to secure those gains, we must continue to invite the Holy Ghost into our lives - daily. — Virginia H. Pearce

This isn't a mass-produced ... instrument. Mike Lull Custom Guitars makes each bass right here in the NW. Over 20 years of collaborating, designing, and building basses has gone into my model. — Jeff Ament

An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. — Ayn Rand

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no
anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Michael Hansmeyer

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [ ... ] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. — Fred Brooks

Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing, — Stephen Elop

To me, you can't have style without being inspired. When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly's wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper. — Isaac Mizrahi

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday — Charles Petzold

The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure. Owen's design for what he called a "parallelogram" was essentially to have a whole city in one building, laid out around a huge quadrangle. Fourier's scheme was to build a massive Versailles-like structure that he called a "phalanstery." In both cases they had these architectural dreams that we now recognize as pretty unappealing. — Christine Jennings

If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be - community-building places, attractive for all people - then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city directly and will have had an immense impact on the rest. — Allan Jacobs

I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer. — Cesar Pelli

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable. — Martin Filler

Index design is also a largely iterative process, based on the SQL generated by application designers. However, it is possible to make a sensible start by building indexes that enforce primary key constraints and indexes on known access patterns, such as a person's name. As the application evolves and testing is performed on realistic sizes of data, certain queries will need performance improvements for which building a better index is a good solution. — Andrew Holdsworth

The level of detail and craft is something that's inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have. — Tadao Ando

Most loss of life and property has been due to the collapse of antiquated and unsafe structures, mostly of brick and other masonry ... There is progress of California toward building new construction according to earthquake-resistant design. We would have less reason to ask for earthquake prediction if this was universal. — Charles Francis Richter

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity. — John Ruskin

is "an architect of the modern type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who 'shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up the plumbing, heating and steel as best as he can.' Nor has he any use for the architect who 'goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public: In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from 'a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the — Ayn Rand

If I wanted to do clothes or if I wanted to make a building or design a choreography, you are able to do that - they are all under a similar kind of design umbrella. — Zaha Hadid

My building was constructed in 1896, and the utilities reflect an odd design that has been jerry-rigged further with each renovation. If you want to understand the wiring and plumbing in my building, you have to understand its history, how it was renovated for each new generation of scientists. My head has a long history also, and that history explains complicated nerves like the trigeminal and the facial. — Neil Shubin

To put this another way, burglary requires architecture. Not infrequently, only because of some aspect of a building's design is burglary even possible. A blind spot, a vulnerability, a badly placed window, a shadowy alcove, an unlocked skylight, a useful proximity between one structure and the next - the burglar sees this opportunity and pounces. — Geoff Manaugh

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert. — Bruce Crown

Nature is an increasingly influential part of building design - we are being guided by trees, rather than overwhelming them. New architecture is finding innovative methods to incorporate natural landscapes into, onto, and around buildings. — Marc Kushner

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok. — Zaha Hadid

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs

What is the "Once upon a time" of your brand story? Ask yourself this: "How does what I'm building help consumers close the gap between who they are today and who they want to be tomorrow? — Laura Busche

By supporting all the links in the building chain and giving them an easy, intuitive tool for sharing model-based project information, GTeam enhances workflows and improves communication from design through to fabrication and assembly. — Greg Lynn

I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching. — John Katzman

All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic herbals for ceramic cats. — Steven Wright

We must stop constantly fighting for human rights and equal justice in an unjust system, and start building a society where equal rights are an integral part of the design. — Jacque Fresco

The creative folks intuitively design what's best for the user, while data folks provide great insights. The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics. — Matthew Humphreys

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ... The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. — Frank Lloyd Wright

We are very proud of our design for the Transbay Transit Center. This will be a beautiful, functional and sustainable building for San Francisco. — Cesar Pelli

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff - or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying - when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?) — Charles Stross

In the summer after kindergarten, a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships. By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size. The living room rug was frequently littered with hundreds of metal "girders" and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding half-finished structures. An understanding mother allowed me to keep the projects going for days on end. — Steven Chu

When you sit down to design something, it can be anything, a car, a toaster, a house, a tall building or a shoe, what you draw or what you design is really a culmination of everything that you've seen and done in your life previous to that point. — Tinker Hatfield

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades. — Martin Filler

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity
say, while waiting to be called to eat
becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.
The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet. — Jane Jacobs

Navigation is about wayfinding, you can't treat it as separate because many other things run parallel with it. If you look at studies in wayfinding, everything from exhibit design to building the cathedrals, it's about creating a complete system. It's about looking at the whole. — Clement Mok

Eventually, after you have planned the whole thing, you will have many, many steps, but they will be organized into a hierarchy of sorts, as shown in Figure5-1. In this drawing, the three dots represent places where other steps go, but we chose to leave them off so that the diagram can fit on the page. This type of design is a top-down design. The idea is that you start at the uppermost step of your design (in this case, "Build flying saucer") and continue to break the steps into more and more detailed steps until you have something manageable. For many years, this was how computer programming was taught. Although this process works, people have found a slightly better way. First, before breaking the steps (which are the verbs), you divide the thing you're building into parts (the nouns). In this case, you kind of do that already, in the first two steps. But instead of calling them steps, you can call them objects — Anonymous

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple ... the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright's building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim. — Paul Goldberger

I was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform. — Matt Mickiewicz

The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing - building empathy for the people that you're entrusted to help. — David M. Kelley

To quiet the land. When there has been unspecific trauma on the land and residents feel the impact, it is possible to do a constellation to identify the trauma and ask blessing of the land To inform land use: reforestation, development of both the land and communities that interface with the land To inform architectural design: Identify locations for green spaces and test environmentally sound building materials To inform energy choices: passive solar, hydro, wind, alternative building practices To support real estate transactions- Why won't a place sell, supporting potential buyers to be able to look at properties in a systemic way To support environmentally based community action agencies Work with pets- both for veterinary practice and to — Francesca Boring

Imagine a house with four walls and a roof. If the house burns down, the walls and roof collapse. But the space inside isn't affected. You can hire an architect to design a new house, and after you build it, the space inside still hasn't been affected. By building a house you are only dividing unbounded space into inside and outside. This division is an illusion. The ancient sages said that your body is like that house. It's built at birth and burns down when you die, yet the Akasha, or soul space, remains unchanged; it remains unbounded. — Deepak Chopra

She'd been lax in her responsibilities as the building owner because her tenants were her friends. Emmylou rented out the left half of the bottom floor space for her massage studio. Chaz rented the tiny center section for his various artistic enterprises. Amery's graphic design business was on the right bottom half and she lived in the loft that spanned the length of the two-story building. — Lorelei James

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

When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space. — Tadao Ando

Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home. — Tony Fadell

The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head. — Michael Graves

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Robert A. Heinlein