Art Quotes

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

~ John Lautner

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

~ Adolf Loos

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

~ Philip Warren Anderson

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

~ Alvar Aalto

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

~ Charles Jencks

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.

~ Renzo Piano

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

~ Maya Lin

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.

~ Thom Mayne

Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.

~ Louis Sullivan

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

~ Oscar Niemeyer

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.

~ Martin Filler

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

~ Charles Jencks

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

~ Sydney Pollack

Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.

~ Sarah Parcak

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.

~ Frank Gehry

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

~ Arthur Erickson

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

~ Arthur Erickson

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

~ Arthur Erickson

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

~ Arthur Erickson

I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.

~ Harold Ramis

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.

~ Richard Rogers

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

~ Peter York

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

~ Havelock Ellis

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

~ Maya Lin

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.

~ Maya Lin

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.

~ Martin Filler

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.

~ Maya Lin

I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

~ Hans-Ulrich Obrist

I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

~ Hans-Ulrich Obrist

I'm inspired by many things, from landscapes to textiles. Art and architecture always influence my design process.

~ Francisco Costa

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.

~ Doug Aitken

'Station to Station' came out of a sense of urgency - a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.

~ Doug Aitken

When I'm in London, Claridge's is a great favourite. I'm a big fan of art deco architecture and the rooms are extraordinary.

~ Roman Coppola

Little do we find any Phoenician architecture or plastic art at all comparable even to those of Italy, to say nothing of the lands where art was native.

~ Theodor Mommsen

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

~ Arne Jacobsen

I was always fascinated by graphic art and typography and architecture. And so I was constantly cutting things and making blocks and making buildings out of shoeboxes.

~ Narciso Rodriguez

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.

~ Alvar Aalto

I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called 'FMR,' so we have a common interest in design.

~ David Chipperfield

I've always been interested in art, architecture, color.

~ Lee Radziwill

I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.

~ Janet Echelman