Architectural Value Quotes

Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

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

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

I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.

Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don’t value architecture, we don’t take it seriously, we don’t want to pay for it and the architect isn’t trusted.

Dodger Stadium is not an antique. It's not Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a nice place to play baseball, but there are far better.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.