English Architect Quotes

Christopher Wren
John Vanbrugh
Augustus Welby Pugin
George Gilbert Scott
William Burges

A man who remains any length of time in a modern Gothic room, and escapes without being wounded by some of its minutiae, may consider himself extremely fortunate.

Augustus Welby Pugin
Augustus Welby Pugin
Tho marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on earth is written.

John Vanbrugh
John Vanbrugh
Since the great French Revolution all colour has been gradually dying out of the male costume, until we have got reduced to our present gamut of brown, black and neutral tint; which, combined with the chimney-pot hat and the swallow-tailed coat, form a costume by no means particularly adapted to refresh the eye seeking for form or colour.

William Burges
William Burges
Views contrary to beauty are deformity, or a defect of uniformity: and plainness, which is the excess of uniformity: variety makes the mean.

Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren
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.

Good architecture will always be as rare as good painting and good sculpture.

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.

Literary organizers of education have a great dislike of empirical methods, but art itself is empirical, and our literary friends must not deceive themselves by their own phrases.

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
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.

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