"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
— Robertson Davies

"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."
— Noel Coward

"A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons)

"The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"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."
— Alain de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness)

"A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit."
— Ezra Pound

"When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass."
— Larry Wall

""History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.""
— Thomas B. Costain

"Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience."
— Roland Barthes (The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)

"The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further."
— Lew Wallace (Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ)

"The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

""When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context." - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994"
— Jonathan Hale (The Old Way of Seeing)

"Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.' For both architect and patron, it's an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz's core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers' collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project's parameters are laid out. "
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"...In Jack Nasar's research on American's taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects."
— Winifred Gallagher (House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live)

"For a brief period of time the American electric-sign industry looked beyond its most immediate market and collaborated with store designers and architects in creating a style which became known as 'stream-line.' Later it became known as 'American Déco.' Whatever it was called or will be called in the future, it represents in terms of neon a thrust away from isolated signage toward an area of architectural ornamentation in which signage is but one element in an overall plan. — Rudi Stern"
— Philip Di Lemme (American Streamline: A Handbook of Neon Advertising Design)

"Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude"
— Jane Jacobs

"Nicht Perfektion macht einen Ort lebenswert, sondern Authentizität."
— Jens Uehlecke

"They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar"
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden & On the Duty of Civil Disobedience)

"The cosmetic is cosmic."
— Rem Koolhaas (Content)

"Light must always win."
— Maurice Smith

"Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely place for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another."
— Sally A. Kitt Chappell

"Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels "
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"Places draw us to them for reasons beyond the feelings derived from the five senses...some deeper recognition is at work, felt throough an unextinguishable animal sensibility."
— Peter & Alison Smithson

"A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism."
— Frederick Phillips Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition)

"The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized."
— Mark Wigley

"The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble."
— Sir Christopher Wren

"Googie architecture could...be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. There are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)