20th-century Architect Quotes

For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a good photograph is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.

I woke up one day to the fact that the earth's surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants,

Architecture should be working on improving the environment of people in their homes, in their places of work and their places of recreation. It should be functional and pleasant, not just in the image of the architect's ego.

Norma Merrick Sklarek

The key to being able to let go of all the stuff you're holding on to is knowing that you'll be okay if you don't have it.
And that's the truth.
You can survive with very little. And though the passing of people and things can be painful, you will survive.

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)

Drawing architecture is a "schizoid" act: it involves reducing the world to a piece of paper.

Eduardo Souto de Moura

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.

Cities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. It is equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.

William J. Mitchell

Some architects think of clients only as sources of work and income but most good architecture is in fact the result of successful design collaboration between a talented architect and an enlightened, motivated client.

Architects must react to the world, not to each other.

Herman Hertzberger

The conscious principle in this design has been to achieve forms that could create experiences, and that could at the same time welcome everyone's experiences with the serenity of an effortless development.

Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts.

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

When politicians and civil servants hear the word 'culture' they feel for their blue pencils.

Lionel Brett, 4th Viscount Esher

For it seems that long before the first enterprising man bent some twigs into a leaky roof, many animals were already accomplished builders.

Bernard Rudofsky

Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.

To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.

As much as the needs of fact, the needs of the spirit and the senses, must be satisfied. Architecture is as much a part of the realm of art as it is of technology; the fusion of thinking and feeling.

The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation his ability to find greatness.

Minoru Yamasaki

A toothbrush is 28 grams of matter, 28 francs to buy and it's made to get rid of scraps of meat from between the teeth. Every gram of matter must provide its service as best it can. My trade is to be a producer of fertile surprises, an opener of doors in people's head.

Philippe Starck

What the West has thrown on the waters of the world drifts back to us on a tide of cultural pollution appalling to behold.

Arthur Erickson

I am always surprised by how much little emphasis schools of architecture, and indeed, many architects, place on the process of the mating of a building.

Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank

One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.

Impressionism is at the root of all modern art, because it was the first movement that managed to free itself from preconceived ideas, and because it changed not only the way life was depicted but the way life was seen.

Francesco Salvi