Architect Quotes

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.

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

James Fergusson (architect)

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

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

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

The architect should always live better than his clients.

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

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

I would like to offer an illustration. Imagine a house which is well designed from a material or practical point of view.... Apart from these physio-functional demands, there are also psycho-functional demands which correspond with our optical, phonetic and tactile experiences. Until now, mankind has attempted to satisfy these 'supra-material' demands with a painting on the wall or a sculpture in a room.... the architecture of the future will have to destroy this duality. Its task will be to express completely and fulfill all our demands.

Theo van Doesburg

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.

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

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

John Belcher (architect)

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.

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.

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

Children should be introduced right from the start to the potentialities of their environment, to the physical and psychological laws that govern the visual world, and to the supreme enjoyment that comes from participating in the creative process of giving form to one's living space.

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.

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

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 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.

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

Eduardo Souto de Moura

The space of time in which a great work can now be accomplished is not marvellous. Brain, muscle, materials, and the means of rapid transport are instantly at command. If one has capital and a well-considered plan, the thing does itself. But that which is wonderful and which I can scarcely believe, although I have been in the midst of it, is the noble, artistic result which has come from the work of American artists who have had only a few months' time to prepare those very designs for the great buildings of the Exposition which have actually been executed with little change from the sketches which were presented in February, 1891.

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.

There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

William McDonough