Architecture Quotes

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.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

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.

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

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

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

I see music as fluid architecture.

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

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

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

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

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

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

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.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

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

I call architecture frozen music.

I am but an architectural composer.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

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.

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

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.

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.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

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

Architecture is invention.

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

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.

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 is the art of how to waste space.

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

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

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

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

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

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

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

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

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Less is more.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

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

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

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

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.

A house is a machine for living in.

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

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

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

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.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

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

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Form follows function.

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

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

What people want, above all, is order.

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

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

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.