Top 957 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Architects - Page 5

I would have loved to be the designer of the Capitol of the United States. I would love to do some important major public building.

A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

Everyone is entitled to a home where the sun, the stars, open fields, giant trees, and smiling flowers are free to teach an undisturbed lesson of life.

In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright - and you can also see it with Mies - they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the Robie House. The roof becomes almost a new ground.

We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of 'the use.' Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty.

It's not just about facts, information and technical know how... Gardens are about time, observation and intuition.

I never talked about architecture with my father, which I regret.

Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you're seventy or eighty, you're still beginning. So, that's the kind of life I've preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know.

There are so many constraints on the architect that public buildings almost never feel free or enjoyable.

Tomorrow we will do beautiful things.

Let us green the earth, restore the earth, heal the earth.

The primary factor is proportions.

I think really good books can be read by anybody.

Little Bobby Jones of Atlanta is really a fine player, and shows every indication of becoming a tremendous great one, once he is master of himself, which must come with maturity.

It requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values. On top of that, the one true gift that an architect has is his or her imagination. We take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.

Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.

Confusion comes from trying to amalgamate several conflicting ideas.

I have always thought, "If the city cannot come to the country, then the country must come to the city."

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

If you want to come up with a really original design idea, and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That's all.

The ultimate goal of the architect...is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture... should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.

Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.

I truly believe that the great heroes that create the history of architecture are people who take risks and write to tell about it.

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give. So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

Society secretly delights in crime, excesses, and violated prohibitions of all sorts.

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.

I don't want to present something that feels too fixated or too restrictive. I'd rather keep it open to evolve. I'm only 24 and who knows who I'll be in a few years. I want my work to progress as naturally as my own growth.

Extremely large greens breed slovenly play. When any green ceases to command respect, it loses its value as a test of that rarest of all strokes, the shot home.

And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important.

I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.

Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

O hasten, Lord, these promised days, When Israel shall rejoice, And Jew and Gentile join in praise, With one united voice!

Man toils, and strives, and wastes his little life to claim-- At last the transient glory of a splendid name, And have, perchance, in marble mockery a bust, Poised on a pedestal, above his sleeping dust.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

By supporting all the links in the building chain and giving them an easy, intuitive tool for sharing model-based project information, GTeam enhances workflows and improves communication from design through to fabrication and assembly.

Variety of uniformities makes complete beauty.

I got into architecture via fine arts, and I was a sculptor myself, and I have always involved artists in my projects. When I say 'involved,' I mean I always bring artists in at the beginning projects before they're built and say, 'Will you do a room? Will you do a sculpture floating in mid-air? Will you make a chimney? Will you do something?'

The dreams of the 1960s began to disappear in the 1970s. The economy collapsed, and so did the optimism of the Metabolists.

Men can do all things if they will.

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Every moment has infinite potential. Every new moment contains for you possibilities that you can't possibly imagine. Every day is a blank page that you could fill with the most beautiful drawings.

When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.

Gravity is measured by the bottom of the foot; we trace the density and texture of the ground through our soles. Standing barefoot on a smooth glacial rock by the sea at sunset, and sensing the warmth of the sun-heated stone through one's soles, is an extraordinarily healing experience, making one part of the eternal cycle of nature. One senses the slow breathing of the earth.

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

If there is no idea in the drawing, there is no idea in the constructed project. That's the expression of the idea. Architects make drawings that other people build. I make the drawings. If someone wants to build from those, that's up to them. I feel I'm making architecture. I believe the building comes into being as soon as it's drawn.

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

Modern building has become so universally conditioned by optimized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited.

The British love permanence more than they love beauty.

Art, indeed, began with abstraction.

Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Poets are born, not paid.