Architecture Quotes

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The White House was designed by Hoban a noted Irish-American architect and I have no doubt that he believed by incorporating several features of the Dublin style he would make it more homelike for any President of Irish descent. It was a long wait but I appreciate his efforts.

~ John F. Kennedy

Genius is personal decided by fate but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

~ Le Corbusier

We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.

~ Winston Churchill

I call architecture 'petrified music'.

~ Goethe

Form ever follows function.

~ Louis H. Sullivan

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.

~ I.m. Pei

Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.

~ I.m. Pei

Let's do it right. This is for the ages.

~ I.m. Pei

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

~ I.m. Pei

What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.

~ Jessica Hawkins

Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it’s on its last legs.The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d’amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously.

~ Jacques Yonnet

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

~ Herbert Simon

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

~ Helmut Jahn

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

~ Yoshio Taniguchi

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.

~ Daniel Burnham

My hope is that light, flexible architecture might bring about a new and open society.

~ Frei Otto

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you're talking about building a house, you're talking about dreams.

~ Robert A. M. Stern

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.

~ Thom Mayne

In a way, architecture is about communication. That's an aspect of the discipline that is somewhat lacking, and there's definitely room for more progression into that area. I suppose that gives me a bit of a different edge. I'm also very, very used to doing a lot of exhaustive research and finding interesting information from different sources.

~ Magnus Larsson

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

~ Michael Mandelbaum

For me, architecture is not just creating a space to protect people but to make them dream as well.

~ Mario Botta

Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.

~ Zaha Hadid

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

~ Philip Johnson

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

~ Philip Johnson

I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.

~ Bjarke Ingels

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

~ Philip Johnson

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

~ Peter Zumthor

Underwater, I experience space with my body. I'll see a school of fish gathering and moving together and I'll exclaim, 'This is architecture.'

~ Antoine Predock

I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people.

~ Donna Karan

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.

~ Arthur Erickson

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.

~ Peter Zumthor

I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.

~ Tadao Ando

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

~ Richard Rogers

Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.

~ I. M. Pei

Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.

~ Tadao Ando

For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects.

~ Steven Holl

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

~ Tadao Ando

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

~ Rudolf Steiner

I am involved in the architecture of space.

~ James Turrell