Architecture Quotes

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.
Julia Morgan

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Le Corbusier

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Each new situation requires a new architecture.
Jean Nouvel

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi

I call architecture frozen music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.
Tadao Ando

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.
Daniel Libeskind

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

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.
Richard Rogers

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

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.
Luis Barragan

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.
Harry Seidler

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature – this very unique to Japan.
Tadao Ando

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T. E. Lawrence

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.
Ernest Dimnet

Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Walter Gropius

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

Architecture is invention.
Oscar Niemeyer

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
Guillaume Apollinaire

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

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
Louis Kahn

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.
James Rouse

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It’s a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
Ai Weiwei

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

A house is a machine for living in.
Le Corbusier

The building’s identity resided in the ornament.
Louis Sullivan

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.
Stephen Gardiner

I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
Luis Barragan

Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.
Toyo Ito

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
Adolf Loos

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

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
Henry David Thoreau

I am but an architectural composer.
Alexander Jackson Davis

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
Antoni Gaudi

My buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone.
Julia Morgan

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.
Daniel Libeskind

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
John Ruskin

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

Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.
Enid Nemy

To me, a building – if it’s beautiful – is the love of one man, he’s made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.
Martha Graham

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas

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.
Maya Lin

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

Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.
Frank Stella

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.
Russell Lynes

I don’t believe in morality in architecture.
Michael Graves

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.
Michael Ende

I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
Thom Mayne

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.
Arne Jacobsen

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.
Bryant H. McGill

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson

I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.
Alexander Jackson Davis

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.
Bruce Jackson

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we’re making is something that intrigues me very much.
Michael Arad

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.
Audre Lorde

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Walter Gropius

I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.
Zaha Hadid

I see music as fluid architecture.
Joni Mitchell

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

All real education is the architecture of the soul.
William Bennett

Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.
Kenzo Tange

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

Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.
Frank Stella

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.
Russell Lynes

I don’t believe in morality in architecture.
Michael Graves

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.
Michael Ende

I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
Thom Mayne

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.
Arne Jacobsen

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.
Bryant H. McGill

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson

I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.
Alexander Jackson Davis

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.
Bruce Jackson

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we’re making is something that intrigues me very much.
Michael Arad

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.
Audre Lorde

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Walter Gropius

I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.
Zaha Hadid

I see music as fluid architecture.
Joni Mitchell

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

All real education is the architecture of the soul.
William Bennett

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
Salvador Dali

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
Alvar Aalto

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

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.
Bjarke Ingels

We have to base architecture on the environment.
Toyo Ito

A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body.
Christian Dior

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
Rem Koolhaas

Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man.
Mario Botta

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.
David Chipperfield

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
Charles Jencks

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
Federico Garcia Lorca

Architecture aims at Eternity.
Christopher Wren

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
Quincy Jones

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
Michael Graves

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.
Kenzo Tange

Architecture is a code. It’s a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.
Santiago Calatrava

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
Coco Chanel

Blockchain technology isn’t just a more efficient way to settle securities. It will fundamentally change market structures, and maybe even the architecture of the Internet itself.
Abigail Johnson

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
David Josiah Brewer

I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.
Jason Silva

Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal – the vision, the structure, the architecture.
Joshua Bell

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
Thomas Reid

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don’t read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.
Renzo Piano

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.
I. M. Pei

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

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