Clement Attlee Quotes

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

I love architecture.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan to work. You just can't wing it. I can't get all the materials I need for a house and just start building. Whether it's a career, family, life - you have to plan it out.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

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.

I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.

My job the same as carpenter. What kind of house you want to build? What kind of food you want to make? You think your ingredients, your structure. Simple.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.

I was on the abutment.

The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

I just wondered how things were put together.

Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

Without stones there is no arch.

A man cannot be in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth at one and the same moment.

Look how long it took to build the Freedom Tower, and we wanted that. It took 15 years.

Shoe design is like architecture - with the finest structure and tight, precise seams, it suits my obsessive neatness.

I was always really geeky about design and buildings. Always into architecture as a kid.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

You don't build a great castle just all at once.

I don't see any difference between architecture and engineering. It's the same profession.

The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.

It is a terrific thing to get a building built that has the qualities of greatness in it.