Isambard K. Brunel Quotes

Architecture is by definition a very collaborative process.

Architects design houses. I live in a home.

I am going to design... a Station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc.

There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.

I have an expensive hobby: buying homes, redoing them, tearing them down and building them up the way they want to be built. I want to be an architect.

We forget the importance of engineering, but it's been used to design everything from St. Paul's Cathedral to The Shard.

My first degree was in structural engineering, which is super-boring.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" Yes." My dear fellow, who will let you?" That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

Buildings have been made because of man.

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

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.

Today is the blocks with which we build.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.

To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

No one expected a first year engineering student to build the perfect bridge.

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

My father was a master carpenter and builder. Architectural design, engineering design, mechanical design, three-dimensional views, that was my shtick, my forte.

François Mitterrand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, "You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - you brought the new and the old together." But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.