Architect Quotes

Iron architecture is like the unmanageable mechanical man of Frankenstein; and we do not think it astonishing that, now that our architects have "developed" him, they are at a loss to know what to do with him, or rather how to prevent his destroying them!

George Gilbert Scott

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.

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 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.

One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun

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.

It was never shameful to learn from any teacher things that are useful to know.

Leon Battista Alberti

Nature is strange, fantastic, unexpected, terrible. Like the past, Nature is remote. Indifferent to human preoccupations and disowning human agency, Nature possesses all the more forcibly and imaginative appeal.

Geoffrey Scott (architectural historian)

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.

I need not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools to prove myself an artist... Whilst in other spheres of labor the greater part of our life's toil and moil will of a surety end, as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the end, our labor will be crowned with flowers.

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.

The only limit to your garden is at the boundaries of your imagination.

Thomas Church (landscape architect)

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

Christopher Tunnard

If we range through the whole territory of nature, and endeavour to extract from each department the rich stores of knowledge and pleasure they respectively contain, we shall not find a more refined or purer source of amusement, or a more interesting and unfailing subject for recreation, than that which the observation and examination of the structure, affinities, and habits of plants and vegetables, afford.

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

John Belcher (architect)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.

Owen Jones (architect)

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.

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

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.