Christopher Alexander Quotes

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

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.

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

I always look for nature or natural lighting within buildings and within rooms that has been done by somebody else to suit their needs. I look at it very closely as a photographic thing, then enhance it.

The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

In all matters but particularly in architecture, that which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles. One who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions.

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

Buildings have been made because of man.

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.

Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

I have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

The only thing I learned from the architecture is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place.

Cut out doors and windows for the house. The holes make it useful.

We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century.

My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.

The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit . . .

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

Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety , and Economy.

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.

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

Bill Sofield has the ability to understand the architecture of a space and how to utilize it in the most beautiful way. He can create completely different styles for his clients based on who they are and what their taste is. Our efforts have always been collaborative, and I value what he brings to the table architecturally and aesthetically.