Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 14

Tradition is a challenge to innovation.

When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.

Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.

Fear not, too much, an open enemy; He is consistent--always at his post; But watchful be of him who holds the key Of your own heart, and flatters you the most.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

I believe in the balance between dreaming and building.

If we range through the whole territory of nature, and endeavour to extract from each department the rich stores of knowledge and pleasure they respectively contain, we shall not find a more refined or purer source of amusement, or a more interesting and unfailing subject for recreation, than that which the observation and examination of the structure, affinities, and habits of plants and vegetables, afford.

There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church. I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth

I grew up in an apartment my whole life. It was just me, my mom, and my brother - she supported us. And we've always liked driving through rich neighborhoods, especially around Christmas. We would always admire the wealth. I always had this strange feeling with it.

Custom, madam, is the law of fools, but it shall never govern me.

The door handle is the handshake of the building.

Technology is the answer, but what was the question?

We never could design a building as beautiful as the trees.

Work done by human beings for human beings.

You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.

I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

The hope of good design lies in those designers who believe in what they do and will only do what they believeContrary to hearsay, it is possible to make a living that way.

I didn't want that 15 minutes of fame moment like, 'Oh, she said she was gay.'

A tree is our most intimate contact with nature.

He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed. He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression. He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.

I am simply submerged in work from five in the morning to eleven at night; almost need a few days off to escape a breakdown!

The connection to place, to the land, the wind, the sun, stars, the moon... it sounds romantic, but it's true - the visceral experience of motion, of moving through time on some amazing machine - a few cars touch on it, but not too many compared to motorcycles. I always felt that any motorcycle journey was special.

An architect does not need to spend his whole career making monuments for rich people.

Over the last 30 years there have been a steadily growing number of architects who are returning to traditional and classical principles.

Man shall find his anchorage in self-recognition.

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

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

I think there's an intricacy in doing something that's meant to look really simple and having it actually be quite complicated.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

The freedom to express yourself without fear - that perhaps is something we in the U.S. take for granted. It's almost inconceivable to think we would be afraid to express our opinions or thoughts, but that's not true for all parts of the world now, and certainly not before World War II.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Because the quality of living with nature and allowing it to manifest itself is different than the quality of living in a city, especially a dense city.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.

Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.

You don't have to become a slave in a corporate office or groupie of a celebrity architect, because all you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture.

The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few very rich people. The great mass of society, including those to whom it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it. In the nature of the case private parks can never be used by the mass of the people in any country nor by any considerable number even of the rich, except by the favor of a few, and in dependence on them.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant.

Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.

One of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. If those pixels fall, you can write on it: you can show patterns, images, text.

My first architectural project I did, I must have been fifteen, was for neighbors across the street, a couple of school teachers, and I designed a house for them. I didn't know anything about Le Corbusier or anything like that, but it ended up being a very cubistic kind of house. I always wanted to be an architect.

An art school is generated only by the intensity and heat of a common pressure.

Likewise 'radical'. I'm only radical because the architectural profession has got lost. Architects are such a dull lot - and they're so convinced that they matter.

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level.

I don't think of myself as a brand. Branding to me feels like a position or identity that's frozen in time. I'm more interested in transitions.

For me, architecture is a social act.

My hope is that light, flexible architecture might bring about a new and open society.

At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.

Life is not about maximizing everything, it's about giving something back - like light, space, form, serenity, joy. You have to give something back.

I don't clean now, because I'm paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It's my inner femininity.

Be patient, calm, compassionate. Know that existence is fleeting.

Layering and changeability: this is the key, the combination that is worked into most of my buildings. Occupying one of these buildings is like sailing a yacht; you modify and manipulate its form and skin according to seasonal conditions and natural elements, and work with these to maximize the performance of the building.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

Life is so generous a giver but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial or a sorrow or a duty, believe me that angel's hand is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim, that is all.

The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature.