785 Quotes About Architecture

Stories are the flesh and blood, the link between past and present.

Architecture’s original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism.

Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.

By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?

We might think of metaphor as a device belonging to the poetry of words but metaphor can also be non-verbal – visual, spatial, experiential… Metaphor is essential to the poetry of architecture too.

The metaphors of architecture are protean ghosts haunting a many roomed labyrinth. They morph and fuse, subtly mutating perceptions; like distorting glass. When you look more closely you realise that the labyrinth of architectural ideology is ruled by those protean ghosts.

All architecture is, metaphorically, a shadow cast on a cave wall. Architecture is a version of the truth – a version of sense – proposed by the architect and realised in the physical form of buildings and the identification of places for inhabitation.

We develop our architecture through metaphor. In the distant past we looked to those places we recognised and experienced in nature for ideas – the shelter of a cave, the shade of a tree, the original refuge of the womb, our own proud vertical stance and point of view, the communal circle we make with our friends in a forest clearing… – and sought to emulate them in our architecture.

The general argument is that metaphors live at the conceptual core of architecture; but those metaphors are of many and varied kinds, which change and grow as you try to pin them down.