Doris Lessing Quotes

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

As many an architect will tell you, human behavior changes according to the environment.

The difference between me and a lot of other people is I can feel the effect of light, space, furniture, height, scale, distance, all these micro-environments affect me in a strong way.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

My work reflects a relationship to the built world that shifts between control and randomness, strangeness and beauty, comfort and fear.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects.

Today fear, the most corroding of influences, is the moving cause ...

We shape a building and thereafter the building shapes us.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

By bringing shame to a person, how could one expect to make him a better man?

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

I've always had a great feel for space and how objects occupy it.

When there's change, people are always anxious.

What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.

Landscape affects you.

The way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel determines how you act.