Sustainable Building Quotes

The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

When eco-towns were first announced we said that we would support environmentally-friendly development where local communities supported the home-building; where infrastructure was in place and where the growth was genuinely green.

We are very proud of our design for the Transbay Transit Center. This will be a beautiful, functional and sustainable building for San Francisco.

One of the most obvious reasons to start using timber rather than concrete is that it's the one commonly grown and therefore exceptionally renewable building material that we have available to us. And it acts as storage for carbon dioxide.

The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been very widely aroused; and the broad line of its future development are already clearly discernible.

I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.

Oscar Niemeyer really inspired me. He's from South America, where nature has meaning. And his architecture was not expensive or high tech but artistic and spiritual. I like that.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

Environmental extremists ... wouldn't let you build a house unless it looked like a bird's nest.

The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.

I love '70s organic architecture. I am very influenced by the time when I grew up.

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

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.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

I had always suspected that one could build an entire house from what went into the landfill, and, sure enough, it's true.

My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.

I've been traveling in Guatemala in the rainforest, and here all these houses are made of sticks. It seems so easy to make one.

Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.

There are even many huts built entirely of the universal aloe.