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- “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”
~ Le Corbusier
- “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “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
- “There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through”
~ Dan Rice
- “Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.”
~ Spiro Kostof
- “Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.”
~ Coco Chanel
- “Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul”
~ Ernest Dimnet
- “An architect is the drawer of dreams”
~ Grace McGarvie
- “Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music”
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
- “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
~ Laurie Anderson
- “A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”
~ Philip Johnson
- “Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.”
~ Philip Johnson
- “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture.”
~ Malcolm Miller
- “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over”
~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Architects believe that not only do they sit at the right hand of God, but that if God ever gets up, they take the chair”
~ Karen Moyer
- “Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.”
~ Louis Henri Sullivan
- “Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “The architectural profession gave the public 50 years of modern architecture and the public’s response has been 10 years of the greatest wave of historical preservation in the history of man.”
~ George E. Hartman
- “Architecture is politics.”
~ Mitchell Kapor
- “A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.”
~ Lord Byron
- “Architecture is the work of nations”
~ John Ruskin
- “In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.”
~ Henry Watton
- “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. [On his college registration experience]”
~ G. K. Chesterton
- “I think Miss Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “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. (1939)”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “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.”
~ J. Russell Lynes
- “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 style of architecture.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Buildings don’t exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.”
~ Paul Goldberger
- “A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts”
~ Joseph Addison
- “[It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.”
~ Robert Moses
- “True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure of us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time. We must have order, allocating to each thing it’s proper place and giving to each thing is due according to it’s nature.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “And just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, just as we must understand functions, so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Architecture is a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time.
~ Vincent Scully
- Why can’t we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles – and functional?
~ Charles, Prince of Wales
- You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe – when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.
~ Charles, Prince of Wales
- To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.
~ Robert A. M. Stern
- In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.
~ Le Corbusier
- Buildings should be good neighbours.
~ Paul Thiry
- Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.
~ Arthur Erickson
- A building is a string of events belonging together.
~ Chris Fawcett
- Good architecture is like a piece of beautifully composed music crystallized in space that elevates our spirits beyond the limitation of time.
~ Tao Ho
- Architecture (is) a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing.
~ Kisho Kurokawa
- I saw the bathroom fixtures as a kind of American Trinity.
~ Claes Oldenberg
- Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.
~ Alan Kay
- Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
~ Mies van der Rohe
- When you look on one of your contemporary ‘good copies’ of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.
~ Louis H. Sullivan
- Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
~ Thomas Fuller
- No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
~ John Ruskin
- Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
~ Constantin Brancusi
- The flowering of geometry.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Society needs a good image of itself. That is the job of the architect.
~ Walter Gropius
- Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.
~ Mies van der Rohe
- An arch never sleeps.
~ Hindu proverb
- An architect never sleeps.
~ Brent Thompson
- Develop an infallible technique and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration.
~ Ralph Rapson
- The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls, but in the space within to be lived in.
~ Lao-Tzu
- Good architecture lets nature in.
~ Mario Pei
- Architecture should be dedicated to keeping the outside out and the inside in.
~ Leonard Baskin
- Early in life I had to choose between arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- No house should ever be on a hill, or on anything. It should be of the hill. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared?
~ Walter Gropius
- The house does not frame the view: it projects the beholder into it.
~ Harwell Hamilton Harris
- Architecture is space structured to serve man and to move him.
~ Etienne Gaboury
- Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. ‘Think simples’ as my old master used to say – meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
~ Eero Saarinen
- In speculative buildings, which is most of our business, there are really only three chances to make architecture: the lobby or entrance sequence, the top and the elevator cab.
~ Chao-Ming Wu
- A house is a machine for living.
~ Buckminster Fuller
- A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- The White House was designed by Hoban, a noted Irish-American architect, and I have no doubt that he believed by incorporating several features of the Dublin style he would make it more homelike for any President of Irish descent. It was a long wait, but I appreciate his efforts.
~ John F. Kennedy
- Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
~ Le Corbusier
- We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
~ Winston Churchill
- I call architecture ‘petrified music’.
~ Goethe
- Form ever follows function.
~ Louis H. Sullivan
- The purpose of a structure is to meet our needs, the purpose of architecture is to thrill us.
~ Brent Thompson
