Quotes about Architecture

For they were arranged in three stories, and unlike the courts, they had no pillars. So the upper chambers were set back further than the lower and middle floors.

An outer wall in front of the chambers was fifty cubits long and ran parallel to the chambers and the outer court.

For the chambers on the outer court were fifty cubits long, while those facing the temple were a hundred cubits long.

And below these chambers was the entrance on the east side as one enters them from the outer court.

with a passageway in front of them, just like the chambers that were on the north. They had the same length and width, with similar exits and dimensions.

With a measuring rod he measured the east side to be five hundred cubits long.

And he came around and measured the west side to be five hundred cubits long.

The space from the gutter on the ground to the lower ledge shall be two cubits, and the ledge one cubit wide. The space from the smaller ledge to the larger ledge shall be four cubits, and the ledge one cubit wide.

Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.

The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.