The Architecture Of Happiness Quotes
"A family of four shelters in it, joined by a colony of ants around the foundations and, in spring time, by broods of robins in the chimney stack."
"The dining table, with its waxy tablecloth printed with large buttercups, suggests a burst of playfulness which is thrown into relief by a sterner concrete wall nearby."
"An ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-coloured limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us."
"Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places."
"Even when we have attained our goals, our buildings have a grievous tendency to fall apart again with precipitate speed."
"It is to prevent the possibility of permanent anguish that we can be led to shut our eyes to most of what is around us."
"How proud the householders of Pompeii must have been."
"Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation."
"Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect protest against the state of things."
"The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary."
"Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated."
"Islamic architects wrote their religion literally as well as symbolically onto their buildings."
"A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good."
"Attractive architecture was held to be a version of goodness in a non-verbal idiom."
"We might even, the early theologians suggested, come better to understand God through beauty, for it was He who had created every beautiful thing in the world."
"Spending time in beautiful spaces, far from a self-indulgent luxury, was deemed to lie at the core of the quest to become an honorable person."
"Our impressions of beauty continually swing between stylistic polarities."
"The determinant lay in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself."
"We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave."
"Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities."
"We can understand a seventeenth-century elite’s taste for gilded walls by simultaneously remembering the context in which this form of decoration developed its appeal."
"They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives."
"We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive."
"For the guide, beauty is likely to lie in the lowlands, in meadows and chalets, while high mountains are fearsome places which one would sanely ascend only out of necessity."
"A century later and even the native guide and his ilk would have started to look more benevolently upon the untamed aspects of nature."
"We should know to ask at once what people would have to lack in order to see an object as beautiful."
"Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics."
"Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing."
"The masterpieces of art continue to seem like chance occurrences and artists to resemble cavemen who succeed in periodically igniting a flame, without being able to fathom how they did so."
"We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy."
"Beauty is a likely offspring when order is imposed on such vital materials: when spirit is aligned with logic."
"Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind."
"There is beauty in that which is stronger than we are."
"The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance – holding, spanning, sheltering – with grace and economy as well as strength."
"We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity."
"For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won."
"We welcome an appearance of lightness, or even daintiness, in the face of downward pressure – columns which seem to offer us a metaphor of how we, too, should like to stand in relation to our burdens."
"They are markers of politeness, too, the impulse to go beyond what is required to discharge brute tasks – and of sacrifice as well, for it would have been easier to support the iron arches with straight-sided struts."
"In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence."
"We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts."
"The true heirs of Tokugawa houses frequently bear no simple outward resemblance to their masters: the resemblance is more subtle, relying on proportions and relations."
"We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room."
"There is something enervating about a landscape neither predominantly free of buildings nor tightly compacted, but littered with towers distributed without respect for edges or lines, a landscape which denies us the true pleasures of both nature and urbanisation."
"Our behaviour is riddled with eccentricities which frustrate casual attempts at prediction."
"Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments."
"Although nothing in our feeling about places can honestly be said to defy reason, it is not hard to see why we might look to a religious superstructure to lend substance to our elusive discomforts."
"Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design."
"We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built."
"There was nothing especially promising about the hills of Bath before John Wood the Elder got to them, or about the fields near the swampy North Loch above the medieval core of Edinburgh before James Craig drew up his scheme for the New Town."
"Our cranes, diggers, quick-drying concrete and welding machines leave us with nothing to blame but our own incompetence."
"Culture is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to."
"We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced."
"The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans."