Architecture Quotes

"The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines."

"You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone."

"I'm trying to create architecture as landscape. But I'm not copying nature."

"But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour."

"Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist."

"No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple."

"Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it."

"Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society."

"I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material - more of an environment, not a product."

"For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible."

"Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art."

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

"Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future."

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

"In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That's what today's architecture community should be."

"Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement."

"Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture."

"Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."

"I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull."

"Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part."

"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture."

"The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning."

"When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture."

"Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate."

"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."

"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention."

"The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth."

"The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe."

"I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art."

"Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart."

"Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses."

"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect."

"Of course I know very little about architecture, and the older I get the less I know."

"I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture."

"Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time."

"I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers."

"I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms."

"Whatever good things we build end up building us."

"In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years."

"Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived."

"Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control."

"Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it."

"The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects."

"Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that."

"I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture."

"London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design."

"The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet."

"I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing."

"Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland."

"I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished."