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

A 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower in Chicago [and] a 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower directly across the street.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?

No life is well-rounded without the subtle inspiration of beauty.

Beatrix Farrand

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

Bernard Tschumi

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

Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings.

Fernand Pouillon

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

John Belcher (architect)

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 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.

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.

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.

Architecture is too slow in its realisation to be a 'problem solver'.

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.

Ralph Adams Cram

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