Architecture Quotes

"In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures."

"My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people."

"Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things."

"People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming."

"People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?"

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."

"The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in."

"The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape."

"The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable."

"There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing."

"A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom."

"A pool at the edge of the ocean is the simplest geometry, yet you feel connected to the sea. In a forest with the mountains in the background, you also feel the connection to nature, yet it's a very complex geometry. I think architecture is about controlling these feelings."

"After I finished school, I went to JJ College of Architecture and then to Harvard. I did my B.A. with a major in filmmaking."

"All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial."

"Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star."

"Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower."

"Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body."

"Architecture, by definition, is always standing still."

"Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines."

"Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape."

"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."

"I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit."

"I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work."

"I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me."

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture."

"If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings."

"In China, it's very easy to make architecture special because anything you design will look different, as most parts of the city are very similar. They make so many massive residential buildings."

"Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city."

"My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community."

"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall."

"Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age."

"The architecture scene in China is the most open and free climate compared to many other places. You can find many opportunities."

"The bones of my architecture are very much related to the structure, to the physical fact of how a building can stand up; it's also related to geometry and a certain understanding of the architecture in which there is a balance between expression and function."

"The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s."

"There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. It's the art of putting all your energy into one thing; it's the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture."

"There's nothing Dutch about my architecture."

"Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture."

"We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it."

"When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture."

"You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony."

"A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress."

"Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building."

"Architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement."

"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book."

"Architecture is a living thing. If I want to leave something to the future, it has to be able to change - but retain something of the ethos that we built up over 50 years."

"Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history."