Steven Holl Quotes

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

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.

The essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during Old Saturn evolution.

The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.

Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.

It's like when you want to make a house... the technique is very important.

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.

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

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.

My brothers were tremendous shack builders. My shacks were horrible. My brothers once built a two-story shack from the ground up that was awesome!

It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

Clothes if they are not well cut, you can kill nobody. A building poorly built can kill people. It's a much more difficult work. I would not compare myself with that.

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.