Architect Quotes

Frank Lloyd Wright

• The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find
yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with
you all the days of your life.
• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
• The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own
civilization.
• A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
• Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a
spiritual union.
• “An idea is salvation by imagination.”
• “Space is the breath of art.”
• “A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a
cultivated, enriched heart.”
• “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in
organic simplicity.”
Rern Koolhaas
• Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
• Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
• the client is chaos
Richard Meier
• “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.”
Aristotle
• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a
habit.
Massimo Vignelli
• The life of a designer is one of fight: fight against the ugliness.
Louis Khan
• A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through
measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be
unmeasured.
• Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
• Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted
and the column became.
• The sun does not realize how beautiful it is until a room is made.
• Architectural form should reflect a building's social purpose
Antoni Gaudi
• “Ornamentation has been, is, and will be polychrome. Nature does
not present us with an object in monochrome, totally uniform with
respect to colour – not in vegetation, not in geology, not in
topography, not in the animal kingdom. Always the contrast of colour
is more or less lively, and for this reason we must colour wholly or in
part every architectural element.”
• form does not necessarily follow function
• straight lines belong to man, curved lines belong to God
I.M. Pei
• architecture is the expression of the past
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• Less is more
• Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There
it begins.
• I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
• Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
Renzo Piano
• One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like
life starting all over again.
• Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you
can fight against gravity.
• “A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head.”
Daniel Libeskind
• To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to
articulate it.
• Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just
an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built.
• We live in a time of renaissance … cities are coming back to life, after
a long neglect.
• Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of
the soil. It's based on wonder.
 Tadao Ando
• I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.
• If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that
nothingness.
• My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.
• I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into
the future.
• You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will
remain vividly with you.
• People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to
be an overlap between beauty and intellect.
• I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the
naked structure, the spirit of the thing.
• “You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see
around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with
contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.”
Yamasaki
• “The purpose of architecture is to create an atmosphere in which
man can live, work, and enjoy.”
Kenzō Tange
• Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.
• I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to
contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban
planning.
• Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and
cities in the informational society.
• “Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as
no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the
future.”
• “Modern Architecture need not be Wester
• Inconsistency itself breeds vitality.
Le Corbusier
• A house is a machine for living in.
• Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms
assembled in the light.
• I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
• Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much
as they need bread or a place to sleep.
• The home should be the treasure chest of living. “A hundred times have I
thought
• New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.”
• the 'styles' are a lie
Frank Gehry
• Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for
timelessness.
• I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to
do.
• “98% of what gets built today is shit.”
Zaha Hadid
• Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel
good in a space … On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also
about pleasure.
Buckminster Fuller
• When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But
when I'm finished, if the solution is not beautiful I know it's wrong.
• When I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.
Adolf Loos
• Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.
• Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task
therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
• Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.
• ornament equals crime
• lift the building in the ground
• “Supply and demand regulate architectural form.”
Richard Rogers
• “My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason
the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects -
can affect the quality of life of the people.”
Alvar Aalto
• Nature, not the machine, should serve as the model for architecture
Norman Foster
• As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the
past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
• “Architecture is an expression of values.”
Oscar Niemeyer
• Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it
with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that
what is important is life, friends, and attempting to make this unjust
world a better place in which to live.
• “My work is not about 'form follows function’, but 'form follows
beauty' or, even better, 'form follows feminine.”
• I have always accepted and respected all schools of architecture.
From the chill and elemental structure of Mies van der Rohe, to the
imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in
a way that is naturally linked to my root and the country of my origin.
• architecture is expression of poetry
Luis Sullivan
• Form follows function.
Philip Johnson
• “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”
Vitruvius
• “A harmonious design requires that nothing be added or taken away.”
Gustave Eiffel
• “The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of
a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.”
Santiago Calatrava
• “I am always searching for more light and space.”
Shigeru Ban
• “I believe that the material doesn’t need to be strong to be used to
build a strong structure. The strength of the structure has nothing to
do with strength of the material.”
Jorn Utzon
• “There is a rumour that I can’t draw and never could. This is probably
because I work so much with models. Models are one of the most
beautiful design tools, but I still do the finest drawings you can
imagine.”
Daniel Burnham
• “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make
big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble,
logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone
be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.”
Jean Nouvel
• “Each new situation requires a new architecture.”
Toyo Ito
• “Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify
it and use a language that everyone can understand.”
Michael Graves
• “In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic
function and the symbolic function.”
• “I believe that people make natural association with forms, color and
the composition of elements while decoration and detailing help
communicate with a building’s purpose.”
Luis Barragan
• “Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates
aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment
produces well being.”
Walter Gropius
• “Our ultimate goal, therefore, was the composite but inseparable
work of art --- the great building --- In which the old dividing line
between monumental and decorative elements would have
disappeared forever.”
• “Architecture begins where engineering ends.”
Richard Neutra

• “A House is like a Flower Pot”

• Rush city
Marcel Breuer

• “Maximum Simplicity”
• art and architecture are two different things
Caesar Homer Concio

• The structure must be well oriented