20th-century Architect Quotes

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

If you think you're meeting your destiny on the other side of a door you may not be interested in its design.

Ettore Sottsass

Society secretly delights in crime, excesses, and violated prohibitions of all sorts.

Bernard Tschumi

I came and knelt at the king's feet, and when he put the crown on my head, I felt that he had just honoured all the women of Iran. Only four years earlier we had been in the same category of the mentally handicapped: we did not even have the basic right of choosing our representatives. The crown wiped out centuries of humiliation; more surely than any law, it solemnly affirmed the equality of men and women.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

The executions of agents, partisans, saboteurs, suspicious people, indulging in espionage and sabotage, and those who were of a detrimental effect to the German Army, were, in my opinion, completely in accordance with the Hague Convention.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures, culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

I am non-European, I don't do conventional work and I am a woman. On the one hand all of these things together make it easier — but on the other hand it is very difficult.

Women overwhelmingly carry the load of the economic chaos and social misery caused by the present money system everywhere in the world.

Margrit Kennedy

You see, years ago I was just an ordinary bee minding my own business, smelling flowers all day, and occasionally picking up part-time work in people's bonnets. Then one day I realized that I'd never amount to anything without an education and, being naturally adept at spelling, I decided that—

True architecture exists only where man stands in the center.

I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.

The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is biological. If we look more deeply we can see it as the basis of an abstract idea linking ourselves with the limitless mechanics of the universe.

Geoffrey Jellicoe

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible.... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Life is very fleeting. It's important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we've done in this life has been good. It was simple; it was modest. Everyone creates their own story and moves on. That's it. I don't feel particularly important. What we create is not important. We're very insignificant.

It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.

Christopher Alexander

Per definition, architecture is a service for the whole human being. As such, architecture includes a material and an immaterial aspect; it has to meet rational and irrational requirements.

Justus Dahinden

For the scientific materialist the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence.

We must apply our humble efforts to the construction of a more just and humane world. And I want to declare emphatically: Such a world is possible. To create this new society, we must present outstretched and friendly hands, without hatred and rancor, even as we show great determination and never waver in the defense of truth and justice. Because we know that we cannot sow seeds with clenched fists. To sow we must open our hands.

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

Architecture is not just to fulfill man's need for shelter, but also to fulfill man's belief in the nobility of his existence on earth.

By making this chair five times as expensive, three times heavier, half as comfortable, and only a fraction as beautiful, an architect can make a good name for himself.

Poul Henningsen

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected.

Daniel Libeskind

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

Herbert Muschamp

I think white is the most wonderful color of all, because within it one can find every color of the rainbow.

Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, hasbeen respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.