Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

architecture

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

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

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

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.

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

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

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

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

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

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

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

I am but an architectural composer.

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

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

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

But the building's identity resided in the ornament.

Make big plans aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

Form follows function.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

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

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

A house is a machine for living in.

We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.

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

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

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

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

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

What people want, above all, is order.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

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

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

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

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.

The interior of the house personifies the private world the exterior of it is part of the outside world.

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

The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.

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

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

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

Less is more.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening to me they are one.