Quotes & Sayings About City Architecture

I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial. — Zaha Hadid

New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. — Francis Picabia

The capitol city of Angkor Kol Ker, the heart of the Khmer empire, held architecture the likes of which Europe would not see for half a century. — Robert Doherty

Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene. — Invader

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening. — Marina Fiorato

Every city is a ghost.
New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park. — Libba Bray

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic's third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country's northeastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia's "heart of steel" offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous. — Terje B. Englund

That's Manhattan today - all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis. — Andrew Vachss

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise. — Mark Helprin

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. — Federico Garcia Lorca

The thing about Chicago is that it really isn't like any other place. The architecture and the layout of the city are the best. I'm from the Midwest, and consider myself a Midwesterner. I feel most at home there. I love California. I have great friends in California. I just have always considered Illinois to be home. — Vince Vaughn

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context. — Tom Turner

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s. — Martin Filler

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims. — Leon Krier

He was enchanted by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above windows. Roguish fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city. — Frank Gehry

I think New Orleans is such a beautiful city. It looks like a fairytale when you walk through the French Quarter or the Garden District. There is such a lush sense of color, style, architecture - and the people themselves. — Anika Noni Rose

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. — Rebecca Solnit

I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me. — Juhani Pallasmaa

The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city's uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and duck's bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs. — Hilary Mantel

Each hamlet or village or town should be a place, its own place. This is not a matter of fake historicism or artsy-craftsy architecture. It is a matter of respect for things existing, subtle patterns of place woven from vistas and street widths and the siting and color and scale of stores, houses, and trees ... If the countryside is to prosper, it must be different from city or suburb ... The difference is in part the simple business of containing our towns and giving them boundaries. — Robert Christopher Riley

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. — Charles Montgomery

After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact - brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the
thinnest veneer. — Ruth Ozeki

Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable. — Rebecca Solnit

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen. — Christian De Portzamparc

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos. — Rem Koolhaas

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time. — Richard Meier

London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city's bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone. — Iain Sinclair

I've spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It's also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains - and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture. — Marcus Brigstocke

The ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star. A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England's pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence. It works as a place to watch baseball — Martin F. Nolan

Nathaniel Willis, having spent his first week walking the city in drizzling rain, said that when the sun burst forth at last it so changed all his previous impressions that he had to set off and see it all a second time. "And it seemed to me another city," he wrote. "I never realized so forcibly the beauty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it. — David McCullough

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances. — Tom McDonough

Charleston has something for everyone, rain or shine. Its architecture is unparalleled. Carriage rides are great for seeing the city and hearing the history behind certain houses and the area. — Thomas Gibson

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture. — Ai Weiwei

When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city. — Christian De Portzamparc

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. — H.P. Lovecraft

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other ... Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation. — Michel De Certeau

Chicago is known for good steaks, expensive stores and beautiful architecture. Unfortunately, the Windy City also enjoys a reputation for corrupt politics, violent crime, and some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere in the country. — Bob Barr

One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city — Aldo Rossi

Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I'd say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I've seen. — Sebastian Bach

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced - and enriched - at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom," "liberty," and "free speech" have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well). — Victor Davis Hanson

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore. — Frank Gehry

The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited. — Frank Gehry

Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
Casually met there who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together - all else
Has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung
To me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous. — Walt Whitman

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness. — Ruth Ozeki

[It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt. — Robert Moses

Leslie inhabited a city of spectacular raids and speculative break-ins yet to occur, a world where criminal opportunities were hidden in the very architecture of the metropolis, just a different way of using its streets and buildings. Lines of sight, potential hiding places, how shadows were cast at different times of day, routes into and out of a bank vault, even the specific order of streets that led to and away from a chosen target: these were the landmarks Leslie looked for and noted. He inhabited a parallel New York, a wire diagram of every potential entrance and connection. Leslie — Geoff Manaugh

As a result of reading science fiction when I was eight, I grew up with an interest in music, architecture, city planning, transportation, politics, ethics, aesthetics on any level, art ... it's just total! It's a complete commitment to the whole human race on all the Earth. That's what science fiction is about. — Ray Bradbury

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture. — Philip Johnson

Let's do it right. This is for the ages. — I.M. Pei

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower. — Richard Rogers

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it. — Claes Oldenburg

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language - they are the foundation of civility and civilisation. — Leon Krier

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree. — Jaime Lerner

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city — Janet Frame

To me ... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting. — Ruth Bernhard

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional. — Leon Krier

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya. — Judith Clancy

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again. — Emma Jane Unsworth

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession. — Ross Macdonald

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

We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it. — Claire Tomalin

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

Be the best, not necessarily the original. — I.M. Pei

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed — Ada Louise Huxtable

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land. — Leon Krier

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life — Joseph Rykwert

I started to begin to be interested in architecture and design when I was 14 years old, which was pretty early in life. And then I would start to look at architectural magazines and I eventually went to the school of architecture too, but one of the things I learned very early is that an architect should be able to design anything from a spoon to the city. — Massimo Vignelli

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive. — Helmut Jahn

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson. — Ben Van Berkel

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

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city. — Toyo Ito

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual
ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world
is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love
passion
liberty.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century — Ross King

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity ... — Louis Aragon

I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man. — China Mieville

I'd rather any kind of business on the ground floor than the utter lack of respect for pedestrians with which buildings are put up in this city today. . . . Nobody cares any more about pedestrian identity. — Claudia Pineiro

MOST CITIES ARE designed on grids that fill them with hard angles. Not Amsterdam, which has a softness about it imparted by the watery curves of the 16th-century canals that fan out through the city. Though its gabled canal houses and narrow medieval streets give it an undeniable old-world charm, Amsterdam's thoroughly contemporary takes on arts, architecture and design show that it has modernity in a firm embrace. It's a city that invites wandering, with a tram system and a plenitude of bicycles (about as many as there are residents) that make navigating as fun as it is easy. Thanks to the locals, most of whom speak English, you'll feel instantly welcome and will be spared the indignity of trying to pronounce Dutch (don't even try). Spend as much time as possible on foot, the better to enjoy the city's theatrical quality: The huge, unshaded windows of the canal homes allow you to peer right in, testimony to the Dutch ethos of having nothing to hide. — Anonymous

New Orleans is unlike any city in America. Its cultural diversity is woven into the food, the music, the architecture - even the local superstitions. It's a sensory experience on all levels and there's a story lurking around every corner. — Ruta Sepetys

Great artists need great clients. — I.M. Pei

I think that as good architecture enhances a city, a good cut enhances the definition and expression of a face. — Vidal Sassoon