Top 100 Architecture Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best architecture quotes ever written, picked out of the full architecture archive on QuoteForever. You will find Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Helmut Jahn among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.

2

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

3

Tension is an interesting quality - and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational.

4

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.

5

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

6

I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year.

7

At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I'm not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.

8

There is much to learn from architecture before it became an expert's art.

9

I always look forward to the next project. That is one of the wonderful things about architecture - you always can hope for another project to design.

10

When I started designing in school, I discovered that I had a knack for it. I fell completely in love with architecture, and I remain in love with it.

11

Don’t go where it is all fine music and grand talk and beautiful architecture; those things will neither fill anybody’s stomach, nor feed his soul. Go where the gospel is preached, the gospel that really feeds your soul, and go often.

12

The building is a special place because of its architecture; But it's people who make it special by participating in it.

13

I would've been intrigued by being a film director. I would've been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture.

14

But then architects don't build their own houses.

15

L’architecture est art de suggestion.

16

I'm totally into architecture for all strata of society. High design should not just be for rich people.

17

For me, architecture is a social act.

18

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.

19

Architecture has curled up in a ball and it's about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you're not sure if it's good or bad but at least it's interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.

20

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.

21

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

22

To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.

23

In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

24

The back of Saint Peter's is one of the finest pieces of architecture I've ever seen.

25

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

26

Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is.

27

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

28

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

29

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.

30

Architecture in general is frozen music.

31

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

32

I graduated from Wesleyan University with a b.a. in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures. So I got an art degree as a default position.

33

We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.

34

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

35

Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life.

36

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

37

The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.

38

I don't find Hollywood interesting, so I'm thinking of studying architecture instead.

39

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

40

The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.

41

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

42

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

43

Architecture cannot be understood without some knowledge of the society it serves.

44

Are not the worst examples of architecture to be found in private enterprise in cheap jerry-built homes?

45

Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same.

46

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

47

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

48

Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture but to have it snubbed.

49

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

50

Ive always seen architecture as a healing art, not just as a beautification art.

51

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

52

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

53

I like to play with architecture! It's my favorite game.

54

That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

55

Architecture is frozen music. [Ger., Die Backunst ist eine erstarrte Musik.]

56

...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.

57

Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

58

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

59

Don't just look at buildings ... watch them.

60

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

61

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

62

I see music as fluid architecture.

63

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life

64

It's not so much about form versus functionality. Rather, it's about doing both and doing them a lot and doing them well-and that's how we should be talking about architecture.

65

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

66

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

67

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

68

I think buildings should imitate ecological systems.

69

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

70

Architecture was pretty much the sexiest thing to be doing from 1700-1800.

71

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

72

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

73

When does a building actually become a built?

74

A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.

75

Gravity is the insidious enemy of the animate.

76

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

77

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

78

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.

79

If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

80

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

81

The Fujiyama of Architecture?at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine.

82

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

83

The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.

84

Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.

85

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

86

The room is the beginning of architecture.

87

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

88

If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it's fine with me. I'm interested in good architecture as anybody else.

89

Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.

90

Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet

91

Less is more.

92

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

93

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

94

Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

95

Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms.

96

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

97

Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names.

98

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

99

The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.

100

I only like decoration if it plays second to the architecture of a dress.

More Architecture quotes

This is the short list. The full architecture quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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