Tim O'Reilly Quotes

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it.

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."

in architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.

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.

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

Today, architecture is invention. It isn't enough to just be rational - It must also be beautiful.

I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.