20th-century Architect Quotes

Alvar Aalto

Albert Speer

Oscar Niemeyer

Zaha Hadid

Buckminster Fuller

Renzo Piano

Frank Gehry

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.

Planning is thinking beforehand how something is to be made or done, and mixing imagination with the product—which in a broad sense makes all of us planners. The only difference is that some people get a license to get paid for thinking and the rest of us just contribute our good thoughts to our fellow man.

Paul Williams (architect)

We are the bullies of the earth: strong, foul, coarse, greedy, careless, indifferent to others, laying waste as we proceed, leaving wounds, welts, lesions, suppurations on the earth body, increasingly engulfed by our own ordure and, finally, abysmally ignorant of the way the world works, crowing our superiority over all life.

'Form follows profit' is the aesthetic principle of our times.

Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they're just things they maneuver through, but the makeup of a person is influenced by the nature of spaces.

After I finished my books, I felt I had to do another one and I thought that if I were to choose a subject, it had to be mosques.

Wahbi Al-Hariri

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.

It was perhaps a bad moment to undertake an architectural guide to the City of London. There are, at the time of writing, still whole areas lying waste after bombing in the Second World War. A number of the City churches, also, are not yet repaired or restored. Yet the publication of this volume was much asked for; so I decided to undertake it in spite of these disadvantages.

Nikolaus Pevsner

Solemn Australians think that an interest in design is a superficial and trivial interest. This is actually an improvement, they used to think it effeminate and vaguely immoral.

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory.

When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone.

Yoshio Taniguchi

Certainly architecture is concerned with much more than just its physical attributes. It is a many-layered thing. Beneath and beyond the strata of function and structure, materials and texture, lie the deepest and most compulsive layers of all.

A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is nonetheless great-in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use.

A Not So Big House feels more spacious than many of its oversized neighbors because it is space with substance, all of it in use every day.

A satisfactory history of architecture has not yet been written, because we are still not accustomed to thinking in terms of space, and because historians of architecture have failed to apply a coherent method of studying buildings from a spatial point of view.

To plant is but a part of landscape composition; to co-ordinate is all.

Christopher Tunnard

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.

Robert A. M. Stern

Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings.

Fernand Pouillon

We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.

The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.

Witold Rybczynski

Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.

A good building should contribute and interact with the environment and underline human values.

In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.

Wanstead was a key building of its age. It looked back to Castle Howard, but by virtue of its purity of detail superseded that house as a model. In its designing there were three stages.