Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins."

"It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise."

"The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions."

"Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance."

"Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form."

"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative."

"Less is more."

"Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. he will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time."

"Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture."

"A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous."

"Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together."

"Architecture is always the will of the age conceived as space - nothing else. Until this simple truth is clearly recognized, the struggle over the foundation of a new architecture confident in its aims and powerful in its impact cannot be realized; until then, it is destined to remain a chaos of uncoordinated forces."

"God is in the details."

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good."

"I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that."

"Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates."

"Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany."

"When one looks at Nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed - it becomes part of a greater whole."