19th-century Architect Quotes

Le Corbusier
Frank Lloyd Wright
Antoni Gaudí
Walter Gropius
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
Theo van Doesburg

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.

Ralph Adams Cram
Ralph Adams Cram
Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier.

Robert Moses
Robert Moses
No life is well-rounded without the subtle inspiration of beauty.

Beatrix Farrand
Beatrix Farrand
Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?

Peter Behrens
Peter Behrens
Men may be divided into two types: men of words and men of action. The first speaks; the latter act. I am of the second group. I lack the means to express myself adequately. I would not be able to explain to anyone my artistic concepts. I have not yet concretised them. I never had time to reflect on them. My hours have been spent in my work.

Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí
Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us
O'er the world's tempestuous sea;
Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us,
For we have no help but Thee;
Yet possessing every blessing,
If our God our Father be.

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.

Literary organizers of education have a great dislike of empirical methods, but art itself is empirical, and our literary friends must not deceive themselves by their own phrases.

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.

One of the reasons why I, 'a medical man' decided to give up medicine was a firm conviction of the extraordinary influence on health of pleasurable excitement, especially when combined with fresh air and exercise. How frequently have I, with great difficulty, persuaded patients who were never off my doorsteps to take up golf, and how rarely, if ever, I have seen them in my consulting room again.

When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.

Iron architecture is like the unmanageable mechanical man of Frankenstein; and we do not think it astonishing that, now that our architects have "developed" him, they are at a loss to know what to do with him, or rather how to prevent his destroying them!

George Gilbert Scott
George Gilbert Scott
Good architecture will always be as rare as good painting and good sculpture.

Architecture, although a form of artistic expression, is not, like painting and sculpture, unfettered by practical considerations; it is an art inextricably bound up with structural conditions and practical requirements.

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

Ralph Thomas Walker
Ralph Thomas Walker
A 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower in Chicago [and] a 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower directly across the street.

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted...

Architecture does not reach its highest estate until it is so infused with imagination and fancy - not undisciplined imagination or capricious fancy - that the ordered fabric delights the eye of every intelligent observer and excites emotions like a poem.

Henry Van Brunt
Henry Van Brunt
Nature is strange, fantastic, unexpected, terrible. Like the past, Nature is remote. Indifferent to human preoccupations and disowning human agency, Nature possesses all the more forcibly and imaginative appeal.

Good architecture never deceives the eye, even for a moment.

Ethnology, based merely on Language and Physiology, is like Geology based only on Mineralogy and Chemistry.

Our modern architects are like parvenus who have come all at once into possession of a large fortune and do not know how to adjust their expenditure with that discretion which belongs only to accustomed opulence.

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
Man obtains from his environment two things which he desires, usefulness and beauty, and all material progress in civilization has consisted in his modification of his surroundings to serve these two needs.

Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere commonplace of the day after to-morrow.

When one understands the principles of design, his taste will have something more solid as a basis than mere whim or fancy, which in the untutored is more likely to be bad than good. Acquainted with the rules of good design he will not accept articles made in defiance of them.

Ernest Flagg
Ernest Flagg