Great Architecture Quotes

#1. It takes a great client to create great architecture.

Curtis W. Fentress

#2. Great architecture has only two natural enemies: water and stupid men.

Richard Nickel

#3. Architecture is supposed to complete nature. Great architecture makes nature more beautiful-it gives it power.

Claudio Silvestrin

#4. There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

Edwin Lutyens

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#6. Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

Joshua Prince-Ramus

#7. I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#8. Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.

Dan Brown

#9. The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture.

Fran Lebowitz

#10. 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.

Frank Gehry

#11. Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design.

Richard Moe

#12. Some people think architecture is about the genius sketch; I don't. Great architecture is a collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time.

Joshua Prince-Ramus

#13. 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

#14. Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

Martin Filler

#15. 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

#16. I am inspired by music, travel, great architecture, and good, healthy food. I look for opportunities to learn about history, art, and cooking. When I learn, I grow.

Tim Matheson

#17. Western cathedrals and abbeys ... through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.

N. T. Wright

#18. Charleston has something for everyone, rain or shine. Its architecture is unparalleled. Carriage rides are great for seeing the city and hearing the history behind certain houses and the area.

Thomas Gibson

#19. Great artists need great clients.

I.M. Pei

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

Antoni Gaudi

#21. 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

#22. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

Edith Wharton

#23. The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

Jay Chiat

#24. My favourite piece of architecture is the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor (273 Bloor Street West). When they cleaned up the old building a few years back, the stonework just knocked me out. It is a great melding of the Old Toronto and the new.

Andy Barrie

#25. The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Jay Chiat

#26. There are a great many things about architecture that are hidden from the untrained eye.

Frank Gehry

#27. Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.

Byron Ortiz

#28. It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something.

Tadao Ando

#29. When your field is architecture, you go visit the great cathedrals of the world. My field was relationships. I got married many times. I was practicing. I didn't date much; I just would get married. I thought, why waste time?

Barbara De Angelis

#30. It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

John Ruskin

#31. A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.

Louis I. Kahn

#32. It would be great if we had our own personal force fields. Just imagine creating your own architecture in your room. Buildings. You wouldn't have to spend all that time saving your money for that second house. You'd simply push a button and have as many houses as you want.

Michio Kaku

#33. The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism.

Will Hutton

#34. Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Roland Barthes

#35. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

#36. Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

Ben Aaronovitch

#37. You look great," he said.
It made her smile, even if it was a lie. "I'm as big as a house."
He laughed. "I like houses. In fact, I'm thinking about architecture as a career.

Kristin Hannah

#38. The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

Stephen Gardiner

#39. A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

Antoine Predock

#40. I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.

Chelsea Cain

#41. Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth ... Architecture aims at Eternity.

Christopher Wren

#42. Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.

Invader

#43. 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

#44. I truly believe that the great heroes that create the history of architecture are people who take risks and write to tell about it.

Peter Eisenman

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

Arthur Erickson

#46. It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.

Julia Child

#47. The true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones.

Peter Ackroyd

#48. My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Donald Barthelme

#49. Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#50. Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.

Kenzo Tange

#51. I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.

Alan Bennett

#52. Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

Tadao Ando

#53. 80% of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning.

Roger Black

#54. I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

Antony Gormley

#55. To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other ... Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

Michel De Certeau

#56. 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

#57. Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Victor Hugo

#58. One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

Renzo Piano

#59. Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

Daniel Dennett

#60. After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

Harry Seidler

#61. Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#62. Yes," Tanner nodded. "I have great appreciation for neoclassical architecture. The ten pillars in the portico give the building a remarkable feeling of dignity and charm."

Bethany lowered her eyes and stifled a giggle. When Tanner put on an act, he put it on well.

Carol Kinsey