Architecture Quotes

Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it’s on its last legs.The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d’amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously.

What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.

Jessica Hawkins

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.

I.M. Pei

Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.

I.M. Pei

Let's do it right. This is for the ages.

I.M. Pei

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

I.M. Pei

Architecture should be dedicated to keeping the outside out and the inside in.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Genius is personal decided by fate but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.

Winston Churchill

I call architecture 'petrified music'.

Goethe

Form ever follows function.

Louis H. Sullivan

Old houses mended Cost little less than new before they're ended.

Anonymous

Architecture is frozen music.

Goethe

Ah to build to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Buildings should be good neighbours.

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.

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.

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.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

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.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Mies Van Der Rohe

An arch never sleeps.

Develop an infallible technique and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration.

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 is a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time.

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

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

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.

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world -- is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love -- passion -- liberty.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

Be the best, not necessarily the original.

I.M. Pei

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. (“Disruption”)

Erik Pevernagie

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