Architecture Quotes

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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.

Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost.

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

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.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

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.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

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.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

A house is a machine for living in.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

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.

In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

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.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

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.

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

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.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

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.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Architecture is invention.

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

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.

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.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

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.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

Less is more.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

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.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

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.

But the building's identity resided in the ornament.

Form follows function.

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.