Architectural Planning Quotes

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

Architects in planning rooms today have forgotten their faith in natural light. Depending on the touch of a finger to a switch, they are satisfied with static light and forget the endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.

When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I'd move in and sell the previous one - so on and so forth.

When I design a building, I'm making sure you and I can get to the front door, there's enough of a threshold for entry, and that the rooms are in a logical sequence.

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

I became intrigued with the whole development sector, going into a community, building it up, coming up with a plan from an architectural standpoint, and bringing it to fruition, especially if you're able to make the community a better place in the process.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

I'd like to be an architect. That would be cool. I like drawing.

Designing a house is like doing a movie: Once you're done, you want to say, 'I hope you all enjoy it.'

I feel most strongly about Jerusalem, because architects ultimately have to address that city.

I am always surprised by how much little emphasis schools of architecture, and indeed, many architects, place on the process of the mating of a building.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

And for every project, because it takes years, you can see the early drawings and collages as just a simple, vague idea, and through the years and through the negotiations of getting the permit, you see that every detail is now clarified.

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.

With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture it is not.

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

I will never tire of recommending the custom, practiced by the best architects, of preparing not only drawings and sketches, but also models of wood or any other material. These... enable us to examine... the work as a whole... and, before continuing any further, to estimate the likely trouble and expense.

When I worked in those offices, it was just irritating to me that somebody sat there and designed this place, never thinking that you would walk from here to there, and they didn't care. The one guy designs it, gives it to the other guy, he looks at it; no one thinks about all the people that gotta walk through it. So I think the best way to show those banal moments is to be just flat and wide.

An architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist.

In addition to the wishes of the client, the position, orientation, and size of the plot also play an important role in determining the final plan of the house. The 'where' and 'how' of the exterior then follows naturally from all of that.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

Is there a homeless guy built in to the design of Dunkin' Donuts? ...There'll be an entrance here... a deranged lunatic here.

The greatest responsibility of the planner and architect, I believe, is the protection and development of our habitat.

I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.