Architecture Inspiration Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Architecture Inspiration. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright (Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture)
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." [MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]
Jim Jarmusch
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...
Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Our lives must not be bogged down in trivial anecdotes, and our encounters bleed out in empty talks. A solid architecture of life vision helps us find the voice and the pulse of our personality. Moreover, it teaches us to respire deeply, inspire multiple thrilling moments and let loose while gathering rosebuds. ("Ruling the waves")
Erik Pevernagie
Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.
Norman Foster
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
William S. Burroughs
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.
Jim Jarmusch
I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
Mies Van de Rohe
No matter how hard life is, you are your own architecture. If you give up then there’s no one that can help you, but if you want to keep building your future, then no one can stop you either.
Jaejoong
Even a brick wants to be something. A brick wants to be something. It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is.
Louis Kahn
Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.
Arthur Erickson
There's a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great 21st century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this city, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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.
Alain de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness)
Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.
Maggie Macnab (Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design (Voices That Matter))
Let your projects be independent organisms. They will develop their own beautiful architecture.
Rossana Condoleo
Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.
Jeanne Gang
We are what we build
Lois Farfel Stark (The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times)
When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction
Umair Siddiqui
Dreaming is a dangerous business, but it never hurts anyone, it's their fright does.
Angel G. (A Street Dream: The Evergreen Architecture)
Go outside, wherever you are, and appreciate each drop of water, each flower, each architectural work of art.
Amy Leigh Mercree (Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life)
We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.
Jonathan Raban (Soft City)
Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.
Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Sometimes the things that destroy you, become the architectural blueprints which make your mind royal.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
Words change meaning over time, and often in unpredictable ways. Queen Anne is said (probably apocryphally) to have commented about Sir Christopher Wren's architecture at St. Paul's Cathedral that it was "awful, artificial, and amusing"—by which she meant that it was awe-inspiring, highly artistic, and thought-provoking.
Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour films, music, books, paintings, poems, photographs, conversations, dreams, trees, architecture, street signs, clouds, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work will be authentic.
Paul Arden
I am convinced that something out of the ordinary, if not truly unique, is occurring in Toronto. It feels like the city is emerging from a chrysalis.
Ken Greenberg (Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges)
Cat's passion for atmospheric architecture was only just second to her passion for Henry.
Val McDermid (Northanger Abbey)
The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life—if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere—and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed.
Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders)
London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed, exuding an air like: 'Hey- do whatever you want, but I'm still Rome. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this town, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be Rome when I am an old lady.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista--streets I cannot relinquish--I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?"--Tennessee Williams
James Grissom (Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog)
Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency? Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority?
Frank Lloyd Wright (A Testament)
Miss Kuhli (Merrihew had heard it “Cooley” the day before, and had built quite a different picture) was Eurasian. Not since the perfection of ferro-concrete and its self-stressed freedom has architecture been able to match the construction of such eyelids and supraorbital arches as those with which Miss Kuhli had been born. Her hands seemed to be the cooperative work of a florist and a choreographer. Her body had not been designed, but inspired, and her hair was such that it could not be believed at a single glance.
Theodore Sturgeon (The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume XIII: Case and the Dreamer)
Harry knew very little about architecture but enough to know that Lucifer’s labors here had later inspired a whole architecture of the living world and their own Gothic creations. He’d been inside some of them on his travels around Europe, in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Santa Eulalia in Barcelona, in Bourdeaux Cathedral, and of course in Chartres Cathedral, where he’d once taken sanctuary, having just killed in the blizzard-blinded streets a demon who had been seducing infants to their deaths with corrupt nursery rhymes.
Clive Barker (The Scarlet Gospels)
Gifford presented the house to Bonaguidi as a series of 'telescopic' spaces in the landscape, and his inspiration hints at the atmosphere in the Pines at this time. A telescope is a device often used for spying: it elongates when engaged in order to capture objects in its gaze.
Christopher Bascom Rawlins (Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction)
Anxious to avoid a repeat of history, Edmund Burke laid out the logic behind the American architecture in a letter from 1791: "Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites [read: flesh]... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Because freedom without self-mastery is a disaster waiting to happen. Saint Augustine said it well: "Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.
John Mark Comer (Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace)
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” —Jim Jarmusch
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Zhou,” Biyu said, when Sabaa paused, “before the Jade Emperor, humans were just like the beasts in the field. We ate, lived and reproduced, but we were going nowhere. The universe is order in all its perfection, stagnant and unchanging. The wars set us free. Free to change, to learn, to adapt, to become more than we were. To do that, we sacrificed order for a measure of chaos, of challenge. It let some people, men and women, do evil, but even that inspired many more to do good. Medicines, writing, music, architecture, all the accomplishments of your Empire came at a high price, but it was worth paying. Tonight we reaffirm that fact. Without the power we grant the Jade Emperor from the realms we represent, we would lose all that we have gained. The universe would reassert its control. Over the years, order would take charge once more and progress would end. Given time, our race would slide back into the beasts we were once. It is something we could not survive.
G.R. Matthews (The Red Plains (The Forbidden List, #3))
That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari')
Kunal Sen
Now in his nineties, Spock is writing a book on spirituality. But his understanding of spirituality is a far cry from that of institutionalized religions: Spirituality, unfortunately, is not a stylish word. It’s not a word that gets used. That’s because we’re such an unspiritual country that we think of it as somewhat corny to talk about spirituality. “What is that?” people say. Spirituality, to me, means the nonmaterial things. I don’t want to give the idea that it’s something mystical; I want it to apply to ordinary people’s ordinary lives: things like love, and helpfulness, and tolerance, and enjoyment of the arts or even creativity in the arts. I think that creativity in the arts is very special. It takes a high degree and a high type of spirituality to want to express things in terms of literature or poetry, plays, architecture, gardens, creating beauty any way. And if you can’t create beauty, at least it’s good to appreciate beauty and get some enjoyment and inspiration out of it. So it’s just things that aren’t totally materialistic. And that would include religion.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention)
right.” Inspired by mid-century architectural lettering of New York City, Gotham celebrates the alphabet’s most basic form. These qualities made Gotham the most popular release of recent years. It’s used everywhere, in logos, in magazines, in the very things that inspired it: signs. Gotham’s simplicity is not merely geometric — like Avenir, it feels more natural than mechanical. In fact, its lowercase shares a lot with Avenir’s, despite being much larger. But Gotham’s essence is in the caps: broad, sturdy “block” letters of very consistent
Stephen Coles (The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces)
...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city?
Alexander McCall Smith (Bertie Plays the Blues (44 Scotland Street, #7))
the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.
Victor Hugo (Complete Works of Victor Hugo)
I used to believe that design was information architecture, and also that this architecture was built in the brain of an information recipient. Recently I've come to think that, although the materials of that architecture's construction are indeed the information brought from the outside by the sensory organs, at the same time some very important building blocks are also the recollected experiences, the memories, awakened by these external stimuli. People imagine the world and interpret it when outside stimuli awaken the mountain of their internally stored memories.
Kenya Hara (Designing Design)
Ben was reminded of his boss, one of the senior architects at the firm, who liked to say that buildings had “multiple lives,” perhaps as a way to cushion the news whenever a beloved building lost the bid for preservation and was slated to be redone. It was his boss’s theory of architectural reincarnation that inspired Ben’s own habit of including some homage to the former building—perhaps a pattern in the stone or a shape of a window—within his designs for any replacement. He liked the notion that even buildings could have memories, and could, in turn, be remembered.
Nikki Erlick (The Measure)
it was with a palpable sense of excitement that Woolly realized they were suddenly approaching the Brooklyn Bridge with every intention of driving across it. How truly majestic was its architecture, thought Woolly. How inspiring the cathedral-like buttresses and the cables that soared through the air. What a feat of engineering, especially since it had been built back in eighteen something-something, and ever since had supported the movement of multitudes from one side of the river to the other and back again, every single day. Surely, the Brooklyn Bridge deserved to be on the List.
Amor Towles (The Lincoln Highway)
How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of "the modern" wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all.
Frank Lloyd Wright (A Testament)
In the quest to create “safe schools,” students have become demoralized and criminalized. The presence of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, harsh ticketing policies, and prison-inspired architecture has created a generation of students, usually poor and of color, who are always under surveillance and always under suspicion. These modes of controlling spaces and the youth within them normalize expectations of criminality, often fulfilled when everyday violations of school rules lead to ticketing, suspension, or worse, court summons and eventual incarceration—a direct path into the criminal justice system.…
Patrisse Khan-Cullors (When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir)
Architecture is perhaps the most beautiful and expressive of all the arts.  Painting and sculpture, noble though they are, lack the utility of architecture and strive to interpret nature rather than to originate.  Architecture is not hampered by the necessity of reproducing something already in existence.  It may raise its spires untrammeled by any nature model; it may fling its arches gloriously across a nave and transept with no similitude in nature to hamper by suggestion.  If his genius be great enough, the architect may tell in his structure truths which may not be put in words, inspire by glories not sung in the divinest harmonies.
Carl H. Claudy (Introduction to Freemasonry II - Fellowcraft)
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.
Jim Jarmusch
With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy. The result was frigidity—or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the sug- gestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art.
Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present)
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.
Ellen Kaplan (Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free)
Pont Saint Benezet.” “What happened to it?” Luce asked. Daniel glanced over his shoulder. “Remember how quiet Annabelle got when I mentioned we were coming here? She inspired the boy who built that bridge in the Middle Ages in the time when the popes lived here and not in Rome. He noticed her flying across the Rhone one day when she didn’t think anyone could see her. He built the bridge to follow her to the other side.” “When did it collapse?” “Slowly, over time, one arch would fall into the river. Then another. Arriane says the boy-his name was Benezet-had a vision for angels, but not for architecture. Annabelle loved him. She stayed in Avignon as his muse until he died. He never married, kept apart from the rest of Avignon society. The town thought he was crazy.” Luce tried not to compare her relationship with Daniel to what Annabelle had had with Benezet, but it was hard not to. What kind of relationship could an angel and a mortal really have? Once all this was over, if they beat Lucifer…then what? Would she and Daniel go back to Georgia and be like any other couple, going out for ice cream on Fridays after a movie? Or would the whole town think she was crazy, like Benezet? Was it all just hopeless? What would become of them in the end? Would their love vanish like a medieval bridge’s arches? The idea of sharing a normal life with an angel was what was crazy. She sensed that in every moment Daniel flew her through the sky. And yet she loved him more each day.
Lauren Kate (Rapture (Fallen, #4))
With its wide, tree-lined boulevards and rich architectural heritage dating back over a thousand years, Paris had long been considered a jewel amongst Europe’s capital cities; a place that had inspired the dreams of romantics, artists and connoisseurs of every kind, from every country. But for Drake, crouched in the shadows of a dimly lit stairwell that smelled of stale urine and damp, it was an entirely different prospect. The rundown residential apartment block in which he found himself was, in contrast to the ornate architecture the city was known for, a product of cheap 1940s utilitarianism. Stark, bleak and inhabited by people who clearly wished they were living somewhere else, it certainly wasn’t the kind of place he’d visit by choice
Will Jordan (Deception Game (Ryan Drake #5))
We say that the body is a temple, because we know that it’s nothing but mortal architecture without the self-regard of consciousness and conscience. The contemplative moment draws us to our sources; we see inside. We close our eyes, in fact, in order to see with clarity. Indeed, the imagination asks us to see with our eyes closed. So we make connections in the dark and thus we imagine what our bodies can do and be, how the breath of the spirit can come and go with perfection, how the ladder gravity of the spine can soar. Poets speak of rhythm and breath as the lifeline of the poetic line; they speak of form as the embodiment of the poem’s energy, the bodying forth of its meaning and being. To expire is to breathe out, to inspire is to breath in. To aspire is to breathe with the mind, to give purpose to the heart’s rhythm. The spine is an aspiration too, since it lifts us from foundations. To imagine what the body can achieve is to invest it with awareness-to begin to make it twice alive: first as a body, then as an embodiment.
Valerie Jeremijenko
Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force. More than any other power in history it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, war or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movement for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. Although explorations and conquests which were in part its outgrowth led to the enslavement of Africans for the plantations of the Americas, men and women whose consciences were awakened by Christianity and whose wills it nerved brought about the abolition of slavery (in England and America). Men and women similarly moved and sustained wrote into the laws of Spain and Portugal provisions to alleviate the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of the New World. Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity. They have attained their most colossal dimensions through weapons and large–scale organization initiated in (nominal) Christendom. Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war. From its first centuries, the Christian faith has caused many of its adherents to be uneasy about war. It has led minorities to refuse to have any part in it. It has impelled others to seek to limit war by defining what, in their judgment, from the Christian standpoint is a "just war." In the turbulent Middle Ages of Europe it gave rise to the Truce of God and the Peace of God. In a later era it was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely. It includes many another humanitarian projects and movements, ideals in government, the reform of prisons and the emergence of criminology, great art and architecture, and outstanding literature.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution. Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms. The word culture is senile and it makes us sick. Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them. We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism: we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance. There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity. We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry. In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans. A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its rise was unstoppable.
Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city. During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel. The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.
David Stuart Davies (The Phantom of the Opera)
of Architecture”  
Joshua DuBois (The President's Devotional: The Daily Readings That Inspired President Obama)
Matt n'avait jamais vu un lieu aussi féérique, une architecture aussi complexe. C'était un véritable château des temps anciens, tout en verticalité, cherchant son inspiration dans les nuages. Une vision digne des contes pour enfants.
Maxime Chattam (Neverland (Autre-Monde, #6))
Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. “All Architecture, worthy the name,” he decreed in 1910, “will, henceforward, more and more be organic.”12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed—down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line—that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum;
Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built)
Europe is the land of great cathedrals. Chartres and Notre Dame in France are world-class by any conceivable measure. Salisbury Cathedral in England is in a class by itself, despite its remote location. St. Peters in Rome is a mecca, and to a lesser extent Rheims in Germany. My amateur eye would unhesitatingly add to that hallowed list, Burgos Cathedral here in northern Spain. It is widely considered one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in Europe. Inspired by the French cathedralism of the Middle Ages, it doesn’t look Spanish in the least.
Bill Walker (The Best Way: El Camino de Santiago)
British artist Alex Chinneck creates large-scale installation art inspired by architecture
Anonymous
What’s unique about Wright’s disdain for endlessly proliferating microdefinitions inspired by and based on other microdefinitions is that he eventually, casually, and seemingly offhandedly suggests at the end of his article that we could simply rewrite the law altogether and eliminate the crime known as burglary. Some men just want to watch the world burn. His logic rests on the fabulous conclusion that, legally speaking, architecture is a form of “magic,” one that has no place in an otherwise rational system. Architecture is the “magic of four walls,” he writes, referring to its power to fundamentally transform how certain crimes are judged
Geoff Manaugh (A Burglar's Guide to the City)
A minister was walking by a construction project and saw two men laying bricks. “What are you doing?” he asked the first. “I’m laying bricks,” he answered gruffly. “And you?’’ he asked the other. “I’m building a cathedral,” came the happy reply. The minister was agreeably impressed with this man’s idealism and sense of participation in God’s Grand Plan. He composed a sermon on the subject, and returned the next day to speak to the inspired bricklayer. Only the first man was at work. “Where’s your friend?” asked the minister. “He got fired.” “How terrible. Why?” “He thought we were building a cathedral, but we’re building a garage.”9 So ask yourself: am I designing a cathedral or a garage? The difference between the two is important, and it’s often hard to tell them apart when your focus is on laying bricks. Sometimes
Louis Rosenfeld (Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond)
Our thinking has many sources.
Robert Venturi (Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies))
Inspirational interior design Ideas for living room design, sleeping room architecture, kitchen design Bạc Liêu, founded by Thanh Trinh Nguyen of Moc Kien Xinh
mockienxinh
People come, students and everyone else, to be inspired by the biennale. They expect to see architecture as a kind of seismograph of where we are.
Aaron Levy (Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse)
Architectures drive technologies, which drive skill sets.
Marty Cagan (INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning. CHRISTINA: Paramecia? MICHAEL: Even before that. Bacteria biofilms. All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.
Michael Levin
Practicing information architecture means exhibiting the courage to push past the edges of your current reality. It means asking questions that inspire change. It takes honesty and confidence in other people.
Abby Covert (How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody)
Our prism can become our prison
Lois Farfel Stark (The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times)
Petra is one of the densest palimpsests of human history. Layer upon layer of archaeological remains provide evidence of a fascinating story that stretches back for thousands of years. It is a masterpiece of human achievement, an aesthetic and architectural marvel, and the source of a huge amount of inspiration since the 19th century. One of the oldest settlements in the region, the site has a long biography tracing Neolithic, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader periods of history. Petra acquired a cosmopolitan atmosphere, as local communities were exposed to a number of different cultural influences. Petra’s
Charles River Editors (Petra: The History of the Rose City, One of the New Seven Wonders of the World)
The Bradford Exchange—a knockoff of [Joseph] Segel’s [Franklin Mint] business—created a murky secondary market for its collector plates, complete with advertisements featuring its “brokers” hovering over computers, tracking plate prices. To underscore the idea of these mass-produced tchotchkes as upmarket, sophisticated investments, the company deployed some of its most aggressive ads (which later led to lawsuits) in magazines like Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Architectural Digest. A 1986 sales pitch offered “The Sound of Music,” the first plate in a new series from the Edwin M. Knowles China Company, at a price of $19.50. Yet the ad copy didn’t emphasize the plate itself. Rather, bold type introduced two so-called facts: “Fact: ‘Scarlett,’ the 1976 first issue in Edwin M. Knowles’ landmark series of collector’s plates inspired by the classic film Gone With the Wind, cost $21.60 when it was issued. It recently traded at $245.00—an increase of 1,040% in just seven years.” And “Fact: ‘The Sound of Music,’ the first issue in Knowles’ The Sound of Music series, inspired by the classic film of the same name, is now available for $19.50.” Later the ad advised that “it’s likely to increase in value.” Currently, those plates can be had on eBay for less than $5 each. In 1993 U.S. direct mail sales of collectibles totaled $1.7 billion
Zac Bissonnette (The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute)
She hated religion as much as she loved its architecture. She detested the pomposity of its spiritual leaders, be they Muslim, Christian or Jews. Whenever she spoke to them, she was outraged by their confident certainty that they were right and all others were wrong, their self-righteousness, haughtiness and aggrandizement. The art and architecture of religion had been amongst mankind's finest achievements, but its inspiration had brought destruction to countless millions. Even the ancient artefacts she'd personally uncovered in the desert, monuments to humanity's earliest attempts to come to terms with spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, had been exquisite, but etched into their stone or marble were the blood and bones of those who believed differently.
Alan Gold (Bell of the Desert)
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
UNCONVENTIONAL DESTINATION WEDDING LOCALES Destination Wedding Jan 6 This wedding season, fall in love with endearing unconventional destination wedding locales Theme Weavers Designs Since all the travel restrictions have been lifted, destination weddings are back in vogue. However, the pandemic has led to a major paradigm shift. In this case, Indian couples are looking into hidden gems to take on as their wedding destination, instead of opting for an international location. With the rich cultural heritage and a myriad of local traditions, it has been observed by industry insiders that couples feel closer to their past and history after getting married in a regional wedding destination. At the same time, it is a very cumbersome task to find the perfect wedding destination - it has to be perfectly balanced in terms of the services it offers as well as having breathtaking views. This wedding season, choose something offbeat, by opting for an unexplored destination, that is both visually appealing and has a romantic vibe to them. Start off your wedding journey with an auspicious location. Rishikesh, on the banks of the holy river Ganges is one of the most sacred places a couple can tie the knot. This tiny town’s interesting traditions, picturesque locales, and ancient customs make this one of the most underrated places to get married in india. Perfect for a riverside wedding in extravagant outdoor tents, this wedding season, it is high time Rishikesh gets the hype it deserves. “The Glasshouse on the Ganges,” is one of the most stunning places to get married. While becoming informed travellers, this place is interred with a vast and vibrant cultural history. It offers an extremely unique experience as it revitalises ruined architectural wonders for the couple to tour or get married in, making it a heartwarming and wonderful experience for all those who are involved. Steep your wedding party in the lap of nature, in Naukuchiatal, Nainital, Uttarakhand. This place is commonly referred to as “treasure of natural beauty,” where it offers mesmerising natural spectacles for a couple to get married in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony. Away from the hustle and bustle of the urban jungles that have slowly been taking over the Indian subcontinent, this location provides a much needed breath of fresh air. This location also provides much needed reprieve from the fast paced lifestyle that we live, making a wedding a truly relaxing affair. As this is a quaint hill station, surrounded with lush greens, there are numerous ideas to create a natural and sustainable wedding. The most distinguishing feature of this location is the nine-cornered lake, situated 1,220 m above sea level. There is something classic and timeless about the Kerala backwaters. This location is enriching and chock full of unique cultural traditions. With spectacular and awe-inspiring views of the backwaters, Kumarakom in Kerala easily qualifies as one of the top wedding destinations in india. Just like Naukuchiatal, this space is a study in serenity, where it is far away from the noisy streets and bazaars. Perfect for a cozy and intimate wedding, the Kerala backwaters are a gorgeous choice for couples who are opting for a socially distant wedding, along with having a lot of indigenous flora and fauna. Punctuated with the salty sea and the sultry air, the backwaters in Kerala are an underrated gem that presents couples with a unique wedding location that is perfect for a historical and regal wedding. The beaches of Goa and the forts of Rajasthan are a classic for a reason, but at the same time, they can get boring. Couples have been exploring more underrated wedding locations in order to experience the diverse local cultures of India that can also host their weddings
Theme Weavers
Utiliser son sac avec grace, c'est comme manger avec elegance, marcher avec prestance ou saisir un verre de champagne avec classe. La beaute se definit en general par la sobriete et l'economie des moyens, par l'adaptation des formes a leur fin, des formes simples, pures et primaires. Investir dans un sac de qualite, c'est non seulement se faire plaisir mais aussi se revolter contre la mediocrite et la consommation de masse grandissante qui peu a peu detruisent notre culture, notre civilisation et nos sens. Acheter de la qualite, c'est encourager une autre forme de commerce, respecter ce que nous possedons, vivre avec la lenteur d'un cuir qui se patine et pratiquer la simplicite: ne pas toujours chercher a acquerir plus tout en se contentant de ce que l'on a. Mon conseil est donc celui-ci: ne regardez pas les sacs exposes dans les magasins pour choisir un modele mais ceux portes par les femmes, dans la rue. C'est la meilleure facon de voir comment le cuir se drappe, la forme se bombe, la matiere se patine et s'ils ont, visuellement, une belle architecture une fois portes. L'argent devrait etre utilise pour vivre dans la qualite, y compris la qualite esthetique. Les belles choses apportent une joie durable. Le choix d'un sac pour longtemps ne serait-il pas le besoin d'une certaine forme de stabilite, d'harmonie et de confort dans ses besoins materiels? Affirmer son style, c'est exprimer par ses choix ses gouts et ses valeurs. Les exterioriser ensuite par le bon choix de vetements et de sacs est l'etape suivante. Etre chic, c'est savoir resister a la tentation. Faire des economies ce n'est pas acheter au meilleur prix l'objet convoite, c'est apprendre sereinement a s'en passer. Le voyage est sans doute la meilleure des situations pour apprecier les bienfaits du minimalisme et s'en inspirer pour l'appliquer au quotidien. Le voyage est l'occasion ideale de "refaire son bagage", c'est-a-dire de repenser la facon dont on vit sa vie et de l'ameliorer. On a tout son temps, en voyage, pour penser, reflechir a ce qui fait le "sel de la vie". C'est sur la route qu'on apprend a se passer du superflu: pas de television, de distractions, de consommation et de shopping. La vie est simplifiee au profit de la mobilite. On a egalement plus de temps pour soi-meme et/ou les rencontres. En voyage, on devient, comme le prescrit le zen, prepare a toutes les eventualites de la vie. le voyage est un retour vers l'essentiel. Proverbe tibetain Vivre avec peu est comme une invitation au voyage, a un vol interieur qui libere du reel et du poids de l'existence.
Dominique Loreau (Mon sac, reflet de mon âme. L'art de choisir, ranger et vider son sac (French Edition))
The real Duc de Guise had been assassinated in 1588 at the Château de Blois, which was the architectural inspiration for the house at 660 Fifth
Anderson Cooper (Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty)
Regarding Notre Dame cathedral: "He could see the huge rose window that had, incredibly, survived the fire. It looked, behind the works, like a giant third eye. Gazing perpetually out at the City of Light and its citizens, while also gazing inward, at their motivations, their characters, their hearts and souls.
Louise Penny (All the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #16))
Everything done at PARC, from the Alto to Bob Metcalf’s Ethernet architecture, was geared to making a decentralized network of personal computers function efficiently. This was new. The second core principle flowed from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As Brown says, “The Dynabook and then the Alto were inspirations meant to empower the artistic individual.
Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs. Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn't let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax's novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parent's bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked. I'd read something in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story. Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as 'inspiration' or 'having something to tell' and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of the narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas. My second great occupation, or I should say my first, was far more suited to comedy, and at times touched on farce. There was a time in which I fell in love on a weekly basis, something that, in hindsight, I don't recommend. I fell in love with a look, a voice, and above all with what was tightly concealed under those fine-wool dresses worn by the young girls of my time. 'That isn't love, it's a fever,' Fermín would specify. 'At your age it is chemically impossible to tell the difference. Mother Nature brings on these tricks to repopulate the planet by injecting hormones and a raft of idiocies into young people's veins so there's enough cannon fodder available for them to reproduce like rabbits and at the same time sacrifice themselves in the name of whatever is parroted by bankers, clerics, and revolutionary visionaries in dire need of idealists, imbeciles, and other plagues that will prevent the world from evolving and make sure it always stays the same.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Christianity pervades with its leavening power all the faculties of man and all departments of life. It is foreign to nothing which God has made. It is in harmony with all that is true, and beautiful, and good. It is friendly to philosophy, science, and art, and takes them into its service. Poetry, music, and architecture achieve their highest mission as handmaids of religion, and have derived the inspiration for their noblest works from the Bible. Whatever proceeds from God must return to God and spread his glory.
Philip Schaff
In its fusion of positive and negative, of ignorance on the way to further knowledge, wonder reveals itself as having the same structure as hope, the same architecture as hope--the structure that characterizes philosophy and, indeed, human existence itself. We are essentially viatores, on the way, beings who are "not yet." Who could claim to possess the being intended for him? "We are not," says Pascal, "we hope to be." And it is because the structure of wonder is that of hope that it is so essentially human and so essential to a human existence.
Josef Pieper (Leisure: The Basis of Culture)
As punk rock was able to sweep the board clean in music, so must the board be cleared in visual art.
Brian Clarke (Architectural Stained Glass)
create their own OKRs for their own organization. For example, the design department might have objectives related to moving to a responsive design; the engineering department might have objectives related to improving the scalability and performance of the architecture; and the quality department might have objectives relating to the test and release automation. The problem is that the individual members of each of these functional departments are the actual members of a cross‐functional product team. The product team has business‐related objectives (for example, to reduce the customer acquisition cost, to increase the number of daily active users, or to reduce the time to onboard a new customer), but each person on the team may have their own set of objectives that cascade down through their functional manager. Imagine if the engineers were told to spend their time on re‐platforming, the designers on moving to a responsive design, and QA on retooling. While each of these may be worthy activities, the chances of solving the business problems that the cross‐functional teams were created to solve are not high.
Marty Cagan (INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
The architecture texts, when I could access them, showed beautiful and inspiring buildings, completely impossible because we didn't have pre-stressed concrete or structural steel, in fact hardly any iron because the satellite hadn't found any ore deposits. We had only bricks and lumber but I'd tried to learn what was practical and apply it and now my first building was falling apart on top of me because people who hadn't studied architecture were sure they knew better.
Sue Burke (Semiosis (Semiosis, #1))
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.
Victor Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris)
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: " It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.
Jim Jarmusch
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: " It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.
Jim Jarmusch
What if we were to build our lives like we build sustainable houses? In harmony with our surroundings, consuming no artificially generated energy. So that we live without wasting food, time, our energy, or our talents.
Inessa Kraft
You expect the process of writing to be like architecture; you lay your foundation and you build your walls around it. But when I write, I find it to be more akin to archeology. It’s as if the book is out there written somewhere and I am just slowly uncovering it, even if it's just one speck of dust at a time.
Caleb T Brabham
That, you see, was the trouble. I am speaking of your attitude towards the subject of architectural design. You have never given it the attention it deserves. And yet, you have been excellent in all the engineering sciences. Of course, no one denies the importance of structural engineering to a future architect, but why go to extremes? Why neglect what may be termed the artistic and inspirational side of your profession and concentrate on all those dry, technical, mathematical subjects? You intended to become an architect, not a civil engineer.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
But the Scottish patron on tour took home with him from Italy much more than his cargo of paintings, sculptures and antique marbles, the tangible souvenirs of his excursion to the south. He took home as well a sophistication of taste and an appreciation of the virtues of classicism which only contact with the Mediterranean inheritance could impart. Only sixty years before the building of the pedimented façade of Duff House in Banff, with its urns and roof-line statuary more in keeping with a southern sky, the typical laird's house in Scotland was still inspired by an economy of display and a strength of fabric deriving from less settled times. The 18th century saw the transportation to Scotland of the idea of the Italian palace, and Hopetoun or Floors or Chatelherault owe their existence to this inspiration.
Basil C. Skinner (Scots in Italy in the 18th Century)
When Keating was called upon to speak, he rose confidently. He could not show that he was terrified. He had nothing to say about architecture. But he spoke, his head high, as an equal among equals, just subtly diffident, so that no great name present could take offense. He remembered saying: “Architecture is a great art ... with our eyes to the future and the reverence of the past in our hearts ... of all the crafts, the most important one sociologically ... and, as the man who is an inspiration to us all has said today, the three eternal entities are: Truth, Love and Beauty....
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
Find What Inspires You Inspiration does not always come to us in a flash. We often have to go in search of it, especially when we feel stuck. Finding inspiration means discovering the things that make you excited—even when they have nothing to do with your art practice. If you go on a trip, you might find inspiration in architecture, landscapes, or traditional patterns found in old cultures. Whatever speaks to you, infuse these visual stimuli from your life into your work. To work through anxieties or find out what ignites your interest, it helps to carry a journal to do daily entries. Maintaining a journal with both written and visual thoughts is a long-standing tradition among artists that helps you ignite creativity and work through blocks. There is no right or wrong way to keep a journal. You can use a book with lined or unlined pages; it can be a written diary with stream-of-consciousness thoughts or a purely visual notebook with pages of drawings. One thing that is helpful, though, is to choose a journal size that is portable, so that you can carry it around with you. Make a habit of writing or drawing in your journal every day. Some days you’ll have only a quick five minutes and other days a whole hour to devote to it. Don’t worry about whether your writing makes sense or your ideas or drawings are any good. Eventually a pattern will emerge that will help unlock your mission as an artist and even identify new avenues for exploration.
Lisa Congdon (Art, Inc.: The Essential Guide for Building Your Career as an Artist)
The vogue for geometrical architecture and painting came and went. Architects no longer care to build blockish skyscrapers like the Seagram Building in New York, once much hailed and copied. To Mandelbrot and his followers the reason is clear. Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world. In the words of Gert Eilenberger, a German physicist who took up nonlinear science after specializing in superconductivity: “Why is it that the silhouette of a storm-bent leafless tree against an evening sky in winter is perceived as beautiful, but the corresponding silhouette of any multi-purpose university building is not, in spite of all efforts of the architect? The answer seems to me, even if somewhat speculative, to follow from the new insights into dynamical systems. Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects—in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these are dynamical processes jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them.
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
Despite mournful envy and Dejected wrath, We bask under blue skies, Bewitching stars, And mystical moons, Loving rumbles of thunder, Glistening raindrops, And a hazy peaceful sunrise. In the face of Sorrowful greed, We delight in magnificent mountains, Bountiful oceans, Turquoise lagoons, Beautiful blossoms, And the green, green grass Of springtime. Through raging anger, Aching sadness, We treasure radiant sunsets, Seek marble courtyards, Ancient architecture, And splendid arched bridges. We sing the praises of Breathtaking falls. Even crushed And bewildered, We are captivated by Exquisite winged creatures, Tropical forests, And the critters we nurture. We embrace the power in our divinity And the superb magic of everything. With every threat to the world We belong to And embrace, We revel in books and dreams. We’re mesmerized by Otherworldly visions And plentiful hues. We cherish The light in ever-curious Truth seekers, And are ever grateful For smiles, Rapturous affection, Laughter, And love.
D.K. Sanz/Kyrian Lyndon