Whatever good things we build end up building us.

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

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

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

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

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.

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

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

I am but an architectural composer.

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.

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

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.

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

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

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

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

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

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

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.

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.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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

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

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.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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.

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.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

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

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

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.

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.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

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

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

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.

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

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

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.

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.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

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.

I see music as fluid architecture.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

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

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

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

I call architecture frozen music.

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.

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

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

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

Less is more.

What people want, above all, is order.

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

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

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.

I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.

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.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

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

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.

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

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.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

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.

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

Form follows function.

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

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

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.

Architecture is invention.

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.

A house is a machine for living in.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.