Architecture Can Be

Art

Form

Alive

Design

An idea

Shelter

Invention

A language

About ideas

An improver

A social act

About people

Frozen music

A form of art

A living thing

About surprise

An applied art

An inspiration

Built diagrams

Made of memory

Not about form

A political act

A pragmatic art

A slow business

About wellbeing

Organized unity

Petrified music

A negotiated art

Making buildings

A cultural output

A pattern of life

Art, nothing else

Essentially human

Ingenuity at work

A service business

Bound to situation

Crystallized music

The mirror of life

Utopian enterprise

A chaotic adventure

A cultural artifact

Frozen conversation

Inhabited sculpture

Giving form to today

Not something static

A very material thing

About time, not space

Inherent buildability

Living, changing, new

Music set in concrete

The result of forming

To see forms in light

A framework of reality

Poetry, when very good

The alphabet of giants

The means, not the end

The mother of the arts

The struggle for light

The teacup and the tea

A kind of bouillabaisse

An expression of values

Art we can walk through

Discovered, not created

Servicing everyday life

The design of interiors

The very mirror of life

What nature cannot make

A container of something

A revealer of who we are

Here for a better living

Not as important as life

The flowering of geometry

The reflection of society

The success of a building

What puts us in our place

An articulation of history

Not created by individuals

A vision of heaven on earth

A way of expressing culture

Expressed in states of mind

Shaped by a really big idea

The result of determination

A reaching out for the truth

A sort of simplified stature

Some kind of frame of nature

The frame of human existence

A chaos of coordinated forces

The practice of the architect

A discipline, not a profession

Public space held by buildings

The art of designing buildings

The art or science of building

The printing-press of all ages

The thoughtful making of space

Light and shade revealing forms

To be experienced, not described

Civic spaces carved out of a city

Diminishing supporting structures

How we place ourselves in a space

The perfect flowering of geometry

The story of how we see ourselves

To transmute emptiness into space

An art we learn more by doing more

Built on a foundation of necessity

The fusion of thinking and feeling

Helping people feel good in a space

The human spirit manifesting itself

Accommodating of a lot of life forms

Designing a brutal skyward extrusion

Not an art about thinking, but doing

The art of organizing interior space

The stage on which we live our lives

Highly political, requiring diplomacy

Putting function and objects in order

A program, budget, place, and schedule

About shelter, but also about pleasure

The material theatre of human activity

The will of the age conceived as space

An imposed art, imposed upon the public

Buildings and other physical structures

How to make people feel good in a space

Rarely the product of a single ideology

The visible sign of authentic democracy

A mark we’ve made on this fragile planet

A unifying or coherent form or structure

Not yesterday, not tomorrow - only today

A discipline that takes time and patience

Working with people and their environment

The will of an epoch translated into space

Making a building as immaterial as possible

To reduce a building's support to a minimum

A sort of oratory of power by means of forms

Something unnatural but not something made up

The expression of national life and character

A constructer and container of our experiences

Changing behaviour by changing the environment

Rational invention that must also be beautiful

The will of the age conceived in spatial terms

To put people in possession of their own earth

A means of making different life forms possible

The art and technique of designing and building

The art of designing and constructing buildings

A hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence

A record of our endeavours through the centuries

Carefully putting two bricks together as a start

One of the predominant orderings of social space

A visual art - the buildings speak for themselves

About forms, space and materials, not about paper

Art vastly fed or fertilised by many other things

About aging well, about precision and authenticity

Too slow in its realisation to be a problem solver

A form of knowledge, not so much a knowledge of form

Made by a team of committed people who work together

Something that makes us know and remember who we are

A knowledge of art, science, technology, and humanity

About comfort, about shelter, about bricks and mortar

The largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes

The play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves

A way to formulate a diagram of how people used to live

An applied art, founded not on theories but on practice

To feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place

A rare collective profession, always exercised by groups

A sensual gratification - it addresses itself to the eye

Not about designing something from a free, fanciful idea

A kinaesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness

As much a part of the realm of art as it is of technology

One of the first steps in the great march of civilization

Concerned with much more than just its physical attributes

The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings

Creating an atmosphere in which we can live, work, and enjoy

A history of the state of the society in which it was erected

A metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be

Mingled with life, and influenced by the complexity of things

Speaking of its time and place, but yearning for timelessness

Retuning what's already there, not just creating new buildings

Drawn up and modelled, but only experienced as a complete whole

Using light and natural materials to get a kind of transparency

A collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time

Like writing - to be edited over and over so it looks effortless

Not only about shelter - it can excite us, calm us, make us think

A rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things

Man's great sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making

The triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and people

The art and science of designing buildings and nonbuilding structures

Formation or construction resulting from or as if from a conscious act

Produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty

Based on wonder, not on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil

Construction that touches the heart and does us good and makes us happy

The geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world

A learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light

Connecting the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible

Building what is appropriate and attaining beauty through such an approach

Dream and function - expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience

Not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived

The masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light

The ordering of space, visual pleasure, power to construct our days and nights

Understanding the world and turning it into a more meaningful and humane place

Eliminating what we don't need as long as we're able to achieve the same result

The form in which the revenues of a civilized people are most likely to be lavished

Science, technology, geography, typography, anthropology, sociology, art and history

The art or practice of designing and building structures - especially habitable ones

Measuring against the past, building in the present, and trying to imagine the future

The constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it

A frame of nature through which we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately

A social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction

The style of design and method of construction of buildings and other physical structures

The design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space

The simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams

To do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living

A very dangerous job - if we make bad architecture, we impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years

Sheltering and enhancing our life on earth and fulfilling our belief in the nobility of our existence

Forms in light and light and shade revealing these forms - cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids

The art of reconciliation between ourselves and the world, a mediation that takes place through the senses

The art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives

The art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction

The triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth

The result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client

A result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way

Not only about shelter, or about a very simple enclosure - it should be able to excite us, to calm us, to make us think

About the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair, not all about the design of the building and nothing else

The process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures

Putting a stone on the ground as the first act, and that act transforming a condition of nature into a condition of culture

Offering or rendering professional services in connection with the design and construction of buildings, or built environments

When one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being

A public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world

Every gesture, every shape justified by various reasons that reinforce their reason to be, their use, and give more sense to their beauty

A record of the minds that conceived the slope of a roof, the shape of a window, and the colour of a door, and the hands that crafted them

About discovering and establishing one's own principle, some kind of regularity, finding an individual formula to apply to one's buildings

The art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by men that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power, and pleasure

A difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty

A hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture

Life, or at least life taking form, and the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived

Not a private affair - even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life

A many-layered thing - beneath and beyond the strata of function and structure, materials and texture, lie the deepest and most compulsive layers of all

The design activity of the architect, from the macro-level (urban design, landscape architecture) to the micro-level (construction details and furniture)

The beginning of something - if we're not involved in first principles, not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration

An unfinished thing, because even though the building is finished, it takes on a new life - it becomes part of a new dynamic: how people will occupy it, use it, think about it

A science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning, by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts

Building what is appropriate and attaining beauty through such an approach, not about building the impossible, which we can do if we have enough money and enough tools and enough computers

The attributes of a system as seen by the programmer - the conceptual structure and functional behaviour, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation

Involved with the world, but at the same time has a certain autonomy that cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal and operate within the terms of the work, like any art