The shan-shui city idea is trying to bring traditional values and ways of living to modern high-rise architecture.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Paris. City of love. City of dreams. City of splendor. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety. Sink of iniquity.

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

Lucknow's architecture is a part of life in the city.

We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

Chicago is a city built on architecture, and there are plenty of buildings to scale.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

Architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.

Design is people.

Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.

Urban residents, most of them middle class, have a much better sense of their environmental rights, and they're willing to take to the streets.

Modern design becomes the eye catcher because it's out of context, it is something newborn and fresh, something people have never seen before. I mean, that in itself is the way we should sort of stimulate the senses of society, this urban condition.

Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

The future of architecture is culture.

In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning - not only as a landscape but a part of daily life.

Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.