Architecture Quotations

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Music, architecture and pictures have always been my passions, and all that material wealth has meant for me, is being able to have some of the pictures I liked.

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.

I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

I think about my work every minute of the day.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

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

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. Im not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.

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

As a child, my father's architecture seemed to me to be industrial in a way. It seemed harsh and kind of chilly; I didn't respond to it.

Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

Architecture has joined the world of fashion, but fashion is passing and architecture is timeless.

I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

Every song, the title dictates the architecture of the song.

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.

What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature.

Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.

My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn't impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

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

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature. Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much.

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

There are a lot of bad films out there. There's a lot of bad architecture out there, and I think sometimes it takes a lot of time to begin to see what's really good. And I think what the test seems to be is, what really sticks with you. And what really becomes a part of your life.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

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.

After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

Princeton is a sublime undergraduate university. It has a good architecture school.

Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.

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

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.

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

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?

In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

I wanted a real profession. And I'd always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what's kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don't.

The show is called 'The Office,' and while it focuses on the people, the architecture of the space is very important.

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.

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 imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.

Architecture has curled up in a ball and it's about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you're not sure if it's good or bad but at least it's interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

I am immersed in architecture all day, working in my office or teaching.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

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

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

To me, the fashion and architecture I like are very closely linked. Both should be clean and simple and without embellishment.

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.

I've never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.

The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.