Environmental Design Quotes

Usually, environmental programs are not designed for a mainstream audience.

At Roden Crater, I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden.

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

Whyte's work remains a living and usable handbook for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Beautiful is difficult. I admire very much the courage of the people who have said, 'Let's do something different. Let's try to see if our environment will be more beautiful and our city will be more beautiful.'

How do you get 'feng shui' out of 'thoughtful'?

Space, space: architects always talk about space! But creating a space is not automatically doing architecture. With the same space, you can make a masterpiece or cause a disaster.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.

The purpose of architecture is to create an atmosphere in which man can live, work, and enjoy.

Design does matter. And not necessarily in a way that people realize. A lot of what you do, people take for granted - that a park has always been here, that a bicycle lane has always been there, that the street is safe or clean.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

I want people to feel they are living in good urban environments with greenery and green space.

People love to go closer to nature and other people, so we need to create environments that let people have these emotional connections.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition.

My husband and I are building a 'green' house in Santa Ynez Valley. We bought 15 acres and we're going to build a house that's green from the ground up.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.