Architecture Quotes

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.
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.
A house is a machine for living in.
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
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.
Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.
Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.
Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.
As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost.
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.
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.
Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.
But the building's identity resided in the ornament.
Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.
Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.
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.
Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
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.
Form follows function.
Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.
Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.
I am but an architectural composer.
I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?
I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.
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.
I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
If I have a style, I am not aware of it.
If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.
In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.
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.
Less is more.
Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.
My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.
My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.
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.
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.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.
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.
Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.
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.
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 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.
The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.
The higher the building the lower the morals.
The interior of the house personifies the private world; the exterior of it is part of the outside world.
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.
The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.
Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.
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.
To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.
Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.
We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.
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.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
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.
What people want, above all, is order.
Whatever good things we build end up building us.