Sustainable Construction Quotes

Rome wasn't built in a day.

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

Everyone must be clear that business as usual is not an option. Most of us live in buildings erected long before we were born and our successors will have to live with the environmental consequences of the buildings we construct today. It is vital that we minimise harmful impacts for those who come after us

Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.

God, we don't have nearly enough skilled carpenters, electricians, plumbers for the work that needs to be done in taking every single building in Canada and making it carbon-zero, a net-neutral building, by improving insulation, modernizing furnaces, improving the geothermal possibilities, heat pumps.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

The government is a very large constructor. They have schools, colleges, hospitals and courts, offices. We are trying to influence the public works department to adopt green buildings.

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future - things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.

I'm afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don't perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I'll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I'm proud of that.

Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

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

Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of "things."

We can plant a house, we can build a tree.

When you go to a normal architecture firm they aren't going to be innovative in terms of their systems. They're not going to be thinking of the whole lifespan of this project, or how do we document every single light bulb, or every product, so that when a chair breaks in a conference room, we can replace it right away.

The construction of a courthouse is a long-term investment in a building where important public business is done. But that does not justify extravagant expenditures. Courthouses should be dignified, durable, and functional. They should not be grandiose, monumental, and luxurious.

Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.

I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.

Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.

The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.

I decided to set out to prove that you could make a reasonable living building for the poor using recycled materials and only hiring unskilled labor.