Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

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

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

God is in the details.

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

To fly we have to have resistance.

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.

There is a very beautiful expression in the Hebrew language that's borrowed from spoken Torah... 'All is predicted, and permission is given at any point to change anything.' I think I live by this idiom in the sense that there is always a goal; there is always something to look forward to in life and my creative search, and that goal is there.

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

Creating work for the time that one lives in means no retro thinking. It can and hopefully does mean timelessness.

Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.

Surprise is key in all art.

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

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

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.

You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

Sustainability can't be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.

I have no philosophy, my favourite thing is sitting in the studio.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace... a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We create vessels in which life happens.

The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something

Form follows function.

People get very excited about very high elements. That's why Mount Everest is so important - it's not the most difficult mountain, but it's the most famous because it's the tallest.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

I believe that people are fundamentally are decent. And, yes, you will have people that sometimes will misbehave.

Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her.

When you have rules to abide by, does that curtail you as a designer, or set you free? People think of classical architecture visually, but I think the brilliant part of it is actually spatial.

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

When we dream alone it is only a dream, but when many dream together it is the beginning of a new reality.

A garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film.

Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man.

I like writing about what to me are like questions that I have about myself and the human condition. I find quantum physics fascinating, so I like to write about that, and I like things that make me laugh.

Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

Good design doesn't date.

American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they're just things they maneuver through, but the makeup of a person is influenced by the nature of spaces.

And I think one of the tasks that I always feel is how to get that vision out of them. Not exactly what they want, but what they want to accomplish for themselves or their community or their family.