Weather you’re a freshman in architecture, or a full grown architect, you should read these quotes because inspiration is something we, human beings just can’t get enough, but on the other hand it is food for the brain. (and quoting dead people makes you look smart and… credible)
Here are 101 famous quotes and quotations in no particular order from some of our “idols”:
#1. A harmonious design requires that nothing be added or taken away.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#2. God is in the details
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
#3. Less is more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
#4. The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#5. Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#6. It’s very atmospheric. It’s not a building that is a severe statement in the skyline. We need the height; otherwise, the building almost disappears because it is so slender.
Santiago Calatrava
#7. Architecture is the work of nations.
John Ruskin
#8. There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through
Dan Rice
#9. Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul
Ernest Dimnet
#10. A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.
Walter Gropius
#11. I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#12. Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.
Spiro Kostof
#13. Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson
#14. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson
#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. Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Walter Gropius
#17. A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.
Walter Gropius
#18. Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.
Louis Henri Sullivan
#19. Architecture is the design of space, both interior and exterior. So it’s much more closely related to dance than it is to painting or sculpture.
Bruce Graham
#20. To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.
Daniel Libeskind
#21. 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
#22. Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry
#23. I think the future of architecture does not lie so much in continuing to fill up the landscape as in bringing back life and order to our cities and towns.
Gottfried Boehm
#24. Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.
John Portman
#25. Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.
Julia Morgan
#26. To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.
Le Corbusier
#27. Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
Louis Kahn
#28. In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
Michael Graves
#29. Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values. On top of that, the one true gift that an architect has is his or her imagination. We take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.
Samuel Mockbee
#30. Each man is the architect of his own fate.
Appius Claudius
#31. A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#32. An architect is the drawer of dreams
Grace McGarvie
#33. Architects believe that not only do they sit at the right hand of God, but that if God ever gets up, they take the chair
Karen Moyer
#34. Women are the real architects of society.
Cher (this one’s specially for you ladies – we love you all)
#35. An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#36. The great thing about being an architect is you can walk into your dreams.
Harold E. Wagoner
#37. Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.
Philip Johnson (no offense ladies)
#38. Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
Sallust
#39. The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams.
Robert A. M. Stern
#40. We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
Richard Buckminster Fuller
#41. ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce
#42. The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.
Benjamin Haydon
#43. All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
Philip Johnson
#44. No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
John Ruskin
#45. It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies
Zaha Hadid
#46. Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.
John Portman
#47. 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
#48. I hope that America as a whole, and especially its architects, will become more seriously involved in producing a new architectural culture that would bring the nation to the apex – where it has stood before – and lead the world.- Tadao Ando
#49. 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
#50. Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas
#51. There’s this very vulnerable planet of ours with finite resources. Architects and designers have, I think, a fair responsibility for conserving energy and materials, and making things durable.
Robin Day
#52. Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
Eliel Saarinen
#53. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#54. All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#55. Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi
#56. Architecture is petrified music.
Felix E. Schelling
#57. Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson
#58. Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.
Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
#59. Form ever follows function.
Louis Henry Sullivan
#60. Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
#61. In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, high-tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit — if totally different in form — from all the romantic architecture of the past.
Dan Cruickshank
#62. Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
Thomas Wolfe
#63. Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
Thomas Fuller
#64. The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.
Ralph Erskine
#66. The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#67. The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
Salvador Dali
#68. When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
John Ruskin
#69. Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.
Anonio Gaudi
#70. I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building.
Frank Gehry
#71. I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#72. An important work of architecture will create polemics.
Richard Meier
#73. 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.
Arne Jacobsen
#74. 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
#75. Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
Adolf Loos
#76. 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
#77. Architecture doesn’t come from theory. You don’t think your way through a building.
Arthur Erickson
#78. 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
#79. Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.
Luis Barragan
#80. Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.
Marcus V. Pollio
#81. Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.
Harry Seidler
#82. Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Le Corbusier
#83. Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
#84. Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.
Arne Jacobsen
#85. Art is very tricky because it’s what you do for yourself. It’s much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
Maya Lin
#86. 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
#87. Each new situation requires a new architecture.
Jean Nouvel
#88. Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
Rem Koolhaas
#89. 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
#90. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
Goldwin Smith
#91. Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.
Stephen Gardiner
#92. I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.
Tadao Ando
#93. If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.
Arne Jacobsen
#94. I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.
Tadao Ando
#95. The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#96. It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean, to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.
Luis Barragan
#97. Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream, and dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?
Khalil Gibran
#98. More is more.
Robert Venturi
#99. Doing more with less.
Richard Buckminster Fuller
#100. Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.
Alvar Aalto
#101. People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming.
Rem Koolhaas
Hope you enjoyed reading these quotes, we surely enjoyed researching and posting them for you here.
What are your favorite quotes and quotations? [don’t have to be one of the ones mentioned here]
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