Architect's glossary
Quality
In the broad sense, quality is the "way of being", good or bad, of a thing or a person. In common parlance, quality tends to refer to what makes something above average. Quality is also a discipline in its own right.
In regards to:
"For architecture, some will speak of the artistic quality of a building and its inclusion in the various movements in the history of architecture, of its ability to move people - even to give pleasure to walk through it and inhabit it. Architecture is the art of making the void in which man evolves vibrate. The art of proportion and harmony and this vibration of the space that surrounds us can provide us with pleasure and well-being.
… for others, architectural quality is this ability to invent, to move forward and to propose new spaces with new materials to sometimes change uses or create new ones. »
There are of course many other meanings: find the article here in full.