Inspirational Quotes on Architecture

Came across a wonderful book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick, and couldn’t resist the urge to jot down some wonderful concepts, key ideas. The book is more about architecture as in construction, buildings, but I find it useful to consider in Software Architecture in an abstract sense too.

PS: These are open to your own interpretation in a positive sense 🙂

• Architecture begins with an idea
• Be more specific to increase appeal
• Any design decision should be justified in atleast two ways
• An architect knows something about everything. An engineer knows everything about one thing.
• Science works with chunks of things with continuity presumed, but an artist works with continuities having chunks presumed
• Good designers are fast on their feet
• Good designers aren’t afraid to throw away a good idea
• Being process oriented, not product driven

• Seek to understand problem before chasing solutions
• Slow to fall in love with your ideas
• Making design investigations and decisions holistically
• Making design decisions conditionally i.e. awareness they may not work as presumed
• Knowing when to change
• Accepting that anxiety comes from not knowing what to do
• Always asking “What If …?” regardless of how satisfied you are
• Favor improved design process over perfectly realized architecture
• Three levels of simplicity

• Simplicity
• Complexity
• Informed Simplicity aka Pattern Recognition
• Professional experts know how to communicate their knowledge to others in everyday language
• Less is more
• Design in perspective!
• No design system is or should be perfect
• Success of masterpiece seems not to lie so much in their freedom from faults, but persuasiveness of mind
• Forget about what you want the design to be, instead ask design what it wants to be
• Always design a thing by considering it in it’s next larger context
• Limitations encourage creativity
• Problems are opportunities to be embraced not overcome
• Just do something while waiting

A few others that I’ve come across from known acquaintances, about character

• Don’t wait until everything is just right.  It will never be perfect.  There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less than perfect conditions.  So what.  Get started now.  With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.

• Success is not final, failure is not fatal:  it is the courage to continue that counts.

• I have not failed 1,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.

• I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

• One-half of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.

• I don’t believe you have to be better than everybody else.  I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.

• The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

• Be miserable.  Or motivate yourself.  Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.

• We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.