Martin Filler Quotes

Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole.

In architecture, Palladio is the game. It means hard thought all through - if it is labored, it fails.

Now architecture consists of order, which in Greek is called taxis ... Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and, as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result.

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

Form follows beauty.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

It is proportion that beautifies everything, the whole universe consists of it, and music is measured by it.

Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.

It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.

Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other.

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

I see lines of space. I break things down into lines and space, and I balance.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.