Architect Quotes

As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

Ralph Thomas Walker

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.

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.

Cities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. It is equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

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

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

James Fergusson (architect)

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.

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'.

Architecture, although a form of artistic expression, is not, like painting and sculpture, unfettered by practical considerations; it is an art inextricably bound up with structural conditions and practical requirements.

Henry Heathcote Statham

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.