ArchitectureBooks about Architecture Click this icon to engrave the quote on mugs, bookmarks, t-shirts and much more
Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?
People actually ask me why I bring in projects on budget and on time. It seems I am not living up to the fashionable genius role. I really enjoy when a project gets down to the wire, and through sheer force of will and faith in our process, we cross the goal line, when most people thought it impossible.
There are many satisfactions in public architecture but one of the greatest is the moment when you unveil a project and suddenly a group of adults – stakeholders, public officials – forget themselves and light up like kids dancing around the model, pointing and saying "that’s us…that building is us."
Some architects have a preconceived notion of what a building should be — they design from the outside like the building is a piece of sculpture. I prefer to patiently search through extensive discovery until I find a seam somewhere, crack it open and discover the art inside of the process.
Our work is really about taking the best of what is in a place and working that into a project. We'd like to take your vision and goals and weave that into all the bricks and mortar and steel and glass put together, along with all the functional things that we need to make the airport work better.
-Curtis W. Fentress, [remarks regarding the project extending the Bradley terminal at Los Angeles International Airport]
Architecture is a chained and fettered art. Far from being "frozen music," it is an art constantly attempting to realize in solid, stable form those effects which music is able to conjure up in an instant—effects which succeed each other rapidly during the progress of a musical work. Music can attain the colossal in a way which, in architecture, only the rarest opportunities render even remotely possible. Music can, in a few moments, admit us through vast portals into avenues, courts and halls of infinite extent and variety. Music can suddenly raise up an entire structure and, by the device of modulation, lift it on to a podium, abruptly recess its facades and turn them bodily into the sunshine. Music can etch silhouettes ten times more intricate than those of Dresden or London City, repeat them, increase or reduce them, hurl them into the distance or bring them before us in precise detail. Most of the essentials of architecture—mass, rhythm, texture, outline—are within music's power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving, the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.
Books about Architecture
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