Out of Context: On Architecture (Definitions)

"Architecture is frozen music." (Friedrich Schelling, "Philosophie der Kunst", cca 1805)

"[...] architecture is a kind of oratory in forms, sometimes persuading or even flattering, sometimes simply commanding." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols", 1889)

"Architecture is geometry made visible in the same sense that music is number made audible." (Claude F Bragdon, "The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture", 1910)

"Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature, our universe." (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], Towards a New Architecture, 1923)

"Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light." (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], "Towards a New Architecture", 1923)

"Architecture is preeminently the art of significant forms in space - that is, forms significant of their functions." (Claude Bragdon, "Wake Up and Dream", Outlook, 1931)

"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul." (Ernest Dimnet, "What We Live By", 1932)

"Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon." (Bruno Zevi, "Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture", 1951)

"Architecture [...] is like a great hollowed-out sculpture which man enters and apprehends by moving about within it." (Bruno Zevi, "Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture", 1951)

"Architecture is not art alone, it is not merely a reflection of conceptions of life or a portrait of systems of living. Architecture is environment, the stage on which our lives unfold." (Bruno Zevi, "Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture", 1951)

"Architecture is the art of how to waste space." (Philip Johnson, "Ideas and Men" New York Times, 1964)

"Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and the spaces between them." (Robert J Piper, "Opportunities in an Architecture Career", 1970)

"Architecture is defined as the art and science of creating buildings." (Derek Hitchins, "Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management", 2003)

"Architecture is akin to music in that both should be based on the symmetry of mathematics." (Frank L Wright)

"Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods and men, to put man into possession of his own earth." (Frank L Wright)