Quotes About Architecture
1. We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us. – Winston Churchill
2. Whatever good things we build end up building us. – Jim Rohn
3. I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. – Ayn Rand
4. A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. – Ayn Rand
5. Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. – Frank Lloyd Wright
6. We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it. – John Ruskin
7. An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site. – Frank Lloyd Wright
8. Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building. – Thomas Fuller
9. Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. – Frank Gehry
10. Less is more. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
11. I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening to me they are one. – Luis Barragan
12. Architecture is the art of how to waste space. – Philip Johnson
13. My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we – architects – can effect the quality of life of the people. – Richard Rogers
14. Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together. – Alvar Aalto
15. The higher the building the lower the morals. – Noel Coward
16. A house is a machine for living in. – Le Corbusier
17. A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable. – Louis Kahn
18. Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator. – Antonio Gaudi
19. Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea. – Yoshio Taniguchi
20. Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light. – Le Corbusier
21. I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture. – Tadao Ando
22. Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us. – Arthur Erickson
23. Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart. – Arthur Erickson
24. Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
25. I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me. – Maya Lin
26. Architecture is the reaching out for the truth. – Louis Kahn
27. We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city. – Alvar Aalto
28. Make big plans aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die. – Daniel Burnham
29. Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise. – Adolf Loos
30. To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it. – Daniel Libeskind
31. To me, a building – if it’s beautiful – is the love of one man, he’s made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that. – Martha Graham
32. Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times. – Richard Rogers
33. Warmth isn’t what minimalists are thought to have. – Maya Lin
34. But the building’s identity resided in the ornament. – Louis Sullivan
35. It is not the beauty of a building you should look at its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time. – David Allan Coe
36. I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach? – Philip Johnson
37. A city building, you experience when you walk a suburban building, you experience when you drive. – Helmut Jahn
38. Every building is a prototype. No two are alike. – Helmut Jahn
39. The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid. – Thomas a Kempis
40. I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people. – Donna Karan
41. Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. – Julia Morgan
42. We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don’t go anywhere. They shouldn’t be restless. – Minoru Yamasaki
43. Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life. – Arne Jacobsen
44. What people want, above all, is order. – Stephen Gardiner
45. The interior of the house personifies the private world the exterior of it is part of the outside world. – Stephen Gardiner
46. If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness. – Tadao Ando
47. Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings. – Marcus V. Pollio
48. Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns. – Arne Jacobsen
49. Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things that’s all. – Harry Seidler
50. Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things. – Rem Koolhaas
51. Cities are the greatest creations of humanity. – Daniel Libeskind
52. No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical. – Michael Ende
53. If I have a style, I am not aware of it. – Michael Graves
54. Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building. – John Osborne
55. Form follows function. – Louis Sullivan
56. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present. – Adolf Loos
57. My buildings don’t speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness. – Thom Mayne
58. Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy. – Jimmy Breslin
59. The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams. – Robert A. M. Stern
60. The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs. – Harry Seidler
61. The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history. – Russell Lynes
62. Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. – Antonio Gaudi
63. In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function. – Michael Graves
64. At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture. – Martin Puryear
65. For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind. – James Rouse
66. The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines. – Saul Steinberg
67. Buildings should serve people, not the other way around. – John Portman
68. Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition. – John Portman
69. My buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone. – Julia Morgan
70. In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings. – Delia Ephron
71. Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time. – Richard Meier
72. Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great. – Enid Nemy
73. I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect. – Alexander Jackson Davis
74. I am but an architectural composer. – Alexander Jackson Davis
75. As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost. – Harry von Zell
76. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. – Henry David Thoreau
77. I call architecture frozen music. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
78. Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions. – Coco Chanel
79. The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. – Milton Friedman
80. I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. – Bob Dylan
81. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. – Ernest Hemingway
82. Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture. – Ernest Hemingway
83. The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in. – Voltaire
84. Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book. – Victor Hugo
85. There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
86. All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
87. Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. – Samuel Butler
88. I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
89. Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. – Steve Martin
90. Architecture begins where engineering ends. – Walter Gropius
91. The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. – Frank Lloyd Wright
92. The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. – Salvador Dali
93. It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. – John Ruskin
94. A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress. – Lord Byron
95. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple. – John Ruskin
96. It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. – John Ruskin
97. Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity. – Frank Lloyd Wright
98. Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral. – Hugo Chavez
99. Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. – Frank Lloyd Wright
100. Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. – Frank Lloyd Wright
101. Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
102. All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! – T. E. Lawrence
103. All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space. – Philip Johnson
104. Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist. – Maya Lin
105. Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design. – Herbert Simon
106. Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. – Audre Lorde
107. 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
108. All real education is the architecture of the soul. – William Bennett
109. Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art. – Alvar Aalto
110. The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line. – Arthur Erickson
111. Architecture theory is very interesting. – David Byrne
112. Today’s developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise. – Arthur Erickson
113. Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture. – Arthur Erickson
114. When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature – this very unique to Japan. – Tadao Ando
115. I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts. – Catherine Deneuve
116. The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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