Architect Quotes

Michelangelo

Le Corbusier

El Greco

Frank Lloyd Wright

Antoni Gaudí

Alvar Aalto

Giorgio Vasari

Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair;
A lamp unto my feet, that sun was given;
And death was safety and great joy to find;
But dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven.

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.

I hold the imitation of color to be the greatest difficulty of art.

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.

I am of the opinion that it is possible to develop an art largely on the basis of mathematical thinking.

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

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

If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.

Hitler had a great gift for adjusting - consciously or intuitively - to his surroundings.... With enormous histrionic intuition he could shape his behavior to changing situations.

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.

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

Eduardo Souto de Moura

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.

In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit – if totally different in form – from all the romantic architecture of the past.

Dan Cruickshank

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

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

James Fergusson (architect)

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

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.

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.

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.

The architect should always live better than his clients.

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.

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

Gravity is measured by the bottom of the foot; we trace the density and texture of the ground through our soles. Standing barefoot on a smooth glacial rock by the sea at sunset, and sensing the warmth of the sun-heated stone through one's soles, is an extraordinarily healing experience, making one part of the eternal cycle of nature. One senses the slow breathing of the earth.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Over the years, it has slowly dawned on me that the people who cause my painful experiences are ignorant and crude. They are the critics who have not read enough and the clients who do not know why they have come to us. I have been helped to realise this by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose friendship inspires us, have no problem understanding my role. They are the sophisticates. Partly through them I gain heart and realise that, over the last twenty years, I have managed to do my work and, despite some sliding, to achieve my own self-respect.

Denise Scott Brown

The massive entablature, the ponderous compartment ceiling, the tabernacle frame, almost the only form of ornament formerly known in this country, are now universally exploded, and in their place we have adopted a beautiful variety of light mouldings, gracefully formed, delicately enriched, and arranged with propriety and skill.