Architecture (from Greek word ἀρχιτεκτονική - arkhitektonike) is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use.

A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding context (see town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture) to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture and hardware. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system.

As a profession, architecture refers to the professional services provided by architects.

Architecture is also experienced through the senses, which therefore gives rise to aural, visual, olfactory, and tactile architecture. As people move through a space, architecture is experienced as a time sequence.

Even though our culture considers architecture to be a visual experience, the other senses play a role in how we experience both natural and built environments. Attitudes towards the senses depend on culture. The design process and the sensory experience of a space are distinctly separate views, each with its own language and assumptions.

Architectural works are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and, sometimes, as works of art. Historical civilizations are often known primarily through their architectural achievements.

Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and the Roman Colosseum are cultural symbols, and are an important link in public consciousness, even when scholars have discovered much about a past civilization through other means. Cities, regions and cultures continue to identify themselves with (and are known by) their architectural monuments.

Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures.

Contents

• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 See also
• 4 External links

Sourced

• The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
  • Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (1923)

• Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.
  • Paul Graham, "Five Questions About Language Design" (May 2001)

• A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality
  • Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)

• I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.
  • John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), chapter III, paragraph 24

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Tue Sep 22 23:17:00 2009