Bjarke Ingels Quotes

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

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

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

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

One of the things I've always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

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

Architecture is undistinguished, sometimes derelict, but occasionally, as in 'Post and Beam,' there is something arresting in a setting... the building behind the Cathedral.

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

He was of opinion that what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought properly and truly be named Saracenick Architecture refined by the Christians.

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.

Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.

Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole.

I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.