Architect Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Ralph Thomas Walker

We are the bullies of the earth: strong, foul, coarse, greedy, careless, indifferent to others, laying waste as we proceed, leaving wounds, welts, lesions, suppurations on the earth body, increasingly engulfed by our own ordure and, finally, abysmally ignorant of the way the world works, crowing our superiority over all life.

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted...

Sigfried Giedion

I woke up one day to the fact that the earth's surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants,

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.

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

Eduardo Souto de Moura

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.

An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.

William J. Mitchell

Planning is thinking beforehand how something is to be made or done, and mixing imagination with the product—which in a broad sense makes all of us planners. The only difference is that some people get a license to get paid for thinking and the rest of us just contribute our good thoughts to our fellow man.

Paul Williams (architect)

Architecture should be working on improving the environment of people in their homes, in their places of work and their places of recreation. It should be functional and pleasant, not just in the image of the architect's ego.

Norma Merrick Sklarek

The vain comet which by its light has disturbed the earth and the heavens begins its harmless journey. With that light bestowed upon it by the creator it shrewdly propitiates the adverse celestial torches by its equal fire. May this comet which alters the heavens with its ready advantage teach me the nature of the stars.

Architects must react to the world, not to each other.

Herman Hertzberger

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

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

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

John Belcher (architect)

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)

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

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

Man obtains from his environment two things which he desires, usefulness and beauty, and all material progress in civilization has consisted in his modification of his surroundings to serve these two needs.

Henry Vincent Hubbard

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

James Fergusson (architect)