Architecture Quotes

"When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time."

"I don't see any difference between architecture and engineering. It's the same profession."

"My architecture is very much place-related."

"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."

"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."

"In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started."

"I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality."

"Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands."

"Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration."

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

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."

"I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them."

"Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture."

"Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do."

"Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times."

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

"Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel."

"Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919."

"People wouldn't know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them."

"Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements."

"In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language."

"Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important."

"I've gone to school for business, for design, for architecture."

"In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas."

"By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades."

"What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them."

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

"Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go... it's just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available."

"I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build."

"Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology."

"Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions."

"Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken."

"Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for."

"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."

"Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building."

"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

"Less is more."

"In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music."

"When I moved to Switzerland to study at ETH Zurich I became fascinated by Swiss architecture."

"When I started university, I didn't know much about architecture, so I flipped through a lot of magazines, looking at different and exciting images from all over the world. I thought that architecture could be interesting."

"Architecture is always political."

"My architecture tends to be legible, light and flexible. You can read it. You look at a building, and you can see how it is constructed. I put the structure outside."

"Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us."

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture."

"We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body."

"You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us."

"There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up."

"I was a rebel. I never wanted to build. We thought of architecture as intellectually bankrupt and slightly corrupt, and I was always more interested in other forms of discourse."

"One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings."