Top 100 Quotes About Architecture
#1. 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
#2. Sometimes the things that destroy you, become the architectural blueprints which make your mind royal.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
#3. 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
#4. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#5. The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.
Michael Hansmeyer
#6. I love '70s organic architecture. I am very influenced by the time when I grew up.
Alexandre De Betak
#7. A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement of the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.
Cedric Price
#9. Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.
Terence McKenna
#10. Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall.
Jeremy Gutsche
#11. The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It's about a way of thinking
Jacque Fresco
#12. 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
#13. I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.
Gates McFadden
#14. When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.
Stephen Kanner
#15. Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.
Leon Krier
#16. 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.
Rem Koolhaas
#17. Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.
Mario Botta
#18. Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#19. The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.
Michel Hazanavicius
#20. Nature builds up her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring.
John Herschel
#21. There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.
Eduardo Souto De Moura
#22. Everyone used to want to be star architects. That's no longer the case.
Shigeru Ban
#23. Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.
Stephen Gardiner
#24. I'm somebody who likes codes and ciphers and chases and artwork and architecture, and all the things you find in a Robert Langdon thriller.
Dan Brown
#25. Architecture is the king or queen of the arts,
Gaetano Pesce
#26. 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
#27. I love antique architecture, so if I have any indulgences, I have owned and renovated and reconstructed a lot of old houses.
Daryl Hall
#28. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.
Alvar Aalto
#29. Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?
Michael Chabon
#30. 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
#31. It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.
Anne Ursu
#32. 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
#33. when you go after the perfect architecture. The difference between the right architecture and the perfect architecture is the difference between finishing a project, and being fired for never finishing the project. You need to seek an architecture that meets the purpose of the project.
Bett Correa-Bollhoefer
#34. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure
Roger Scruton
#35. It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
Oscar Niemeyer
#36. In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.
Delia Ephron
#37. 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
#38. Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
Rafael Vinoly
#39. The yachts' berth was next to the Yas Marina Circuit, where Formula 1 would come into town once a year. At night, when the lights on its orbicular architecture switched on, the circuit would radiate like a constellation of stars
Soroosh Shahrivar
#40. Britain loves a bargain, but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap.
David Chipperfield
#41. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#42. Art and architecture
all the arts
do not have to exist in isolation,
Donald Judd
#43. Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.
Thom Mayne
#46. True features make the beauty of a face, and true proportions the beauty of architecture.
Anthony Ashley Cooper
#47. Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
Louis Kahn
#49. A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.
Helmut Jahn
#50. Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us.
Leslie Weisman
#52. I believe that sensory pleasure should take precedence over intellectual pleasure in art and architecture.
Bernard Rudofsky
#53. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity.
Ayn Rand
#54. Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don't value architecture, we don't take it seriously, we don't want to pay for it and the architect isn't trusted.
David Chipperfield
#55. Of course I know very little about architecture, and the older I get the less I know.
Richard Rogers
#56. It was my interest in happiness that led me to the subject of habits, and of course, the study of habits is really the study of happiness. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness.
Gretchen Rubin
#57. He was of opinion that what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought properly and truly be named Saracenick Architecture refined by the Christians.
Christopher Wren
#58. This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
Ansel Adams
#59. Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell.
John Milton
#60. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. The room is the beginning of architecture.
Louis Kahn
#62. 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
#63. In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
John Ruskin
#64. I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Ayn Rand
#65. The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
Bridges McCall
#66. 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
#67. Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas
#68. There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.
Annabelle Selldorf
#69. Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.
Harry Seidler
#70. True home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;
William Gibson
#71. My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now - our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.
Jean Nouvel
#72. Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.
Paul Goldberger
#73. If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.
Brian Foote
#74. Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.
Arthur Erickson
#75. I was a child of a single mother/art teacher, and a father who was an architect, so I've always been around the combination of art, fine art, and architecture my entire life.
James Pearse Connelly
#76. We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.
Denise Scott Brown
#77. 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
#78. The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Freeman Dyson
#79. Only architecture that considers human scale and interaction is successful architecture.
Jan Gehl
#80. 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
#82. Books are lasting longer than (built) architecture. Most of my important projects may never be built, so buildings are important, artifacts are important, but so are books
Peter Eisenmann
#83. My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
Ben Van Berkel
#84. A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.
David Chipperfield
#85. I think architecture, to be really intense and fulfilling, doesn't have to be large.
Steven Holl
#86. I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
Roy Lichtenstein
#87. Great architecture has only two natural enemies: water and stupid men.
Richard Nickel
#88. In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.
Alain Robert
#89. Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture ... needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.
Daniel Libeskind
#90. The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#91. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
Thomas Reid
#92. Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.
Arthur Erickson
#94. We all love musical architecture; there's no doubt about that.
Levon Helm
#95. I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
Zaha Hadid
#96. From Architecture down to the Zodiac, every science worthy of the name was imported by the Greeks
H. P. Blavatsky
#98. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.
Nina Jacobson
#99. The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands.
"Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957
Frank Lloyd Wright
#100. I like to play with architecture! It's my favorite game.
Jean Nouvel
