FAMOUS ARCHITECTS

QOUTES & SAYING

Good buildings come from good

people, and all problems are solved by
good design.
Stephen Gardiner

It is not the beauty of a building you

should look at; its the construction of
the foundation that will stand the test
of time.
David Allan Coe

My buildings will be my legacy... they

will speak for me long after I'm gone.
Julia Morgan

Time, Beauty, Stand

The mother art is architecture. Without
an architecture of our own we have no
soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Art, Mother, Soul
We shape our buildings; thereafter
they shape us.
Winston Churchill

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
Architecture is a visual art, and the
buildings speak for themselves.
Julia Morgan
Less is more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Buildings, Shape, Thereafter

Architecture should speak of its time
and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry

Architecture is the learned game,

correct and magnificent, of forms
assembled in the light.
Le Corbusier

Time, Speak, Yearn

Whatever good things we build end up
building us.
Jim Rohn

When you look at Japanese traditional

architecture, you have to look at
Japanese culture and its relationship
with nature. You can actually live in a
harmonious, close contact with nature
- this very unique to Japan.
Tadao Ando

Good, Building, Whatever

A great building must begin with the
unmeasurable, must go through
measurable means when it is being
designed and in the end must be
unmeasurable.
Louis Kahn
Great, Means, Building
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
Time, Great, Age

Make big plans; aim high in hope and

work, remembering that a noble,
logical diagram once recorded will not
die, but long after we are gone be a
living thing, asserting itself with evergrowing insistence.
Daniel Burnham
I try to give people a different way of
looking at their surroundings. That's
art to me.
Maya Lin

Architecture starts when you carefully

put two bricks together. There it
begins.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Building art is a synthesis of life in
materialised form. We should try to
bring in under the same hat not a
splintered way of thinking, but all in
harmony together.
Alvar Aalto
A house is a machine for living in.
Le Corbusier
I call architecture frozen music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Architecture begins where engineering
ends.
Walter Gropius
Form follows function.
Louis Sullivan
Those who look for the laws of Nature
as a support for their new works
collaborate with the creator.
Antoni Gaudi
Architecture is the reaching out for the
truth.
Louis Kahn
To provide meaningful architecture is
not to parody history but to articulate
it.
Daniel Libeskind

Architecture is the art of how to waste

space.
Philip Johnson
We are called to be architects of the
future, not its victims.
R. Buckminster Fuller

All architecture is great architecture

after sunset; perhaps architecture is
really a nocturnal art, like the art of
fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I don't build in order to have clients. I
have clients in order to build.
Ayn Rand
I believe that the way people live can
be directed a little by architecture.
Tadao Ando
My house is my refuge, an emotional
piece of architecture, not a cold piece
of convenience.
Luis Barragan
Form follows profit is the aesthetic
principle of our times.
Richard Rogers
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
Rome has not seen a modern building
in more than half a century. It is a city
frozen in time.
Richard Meier
Architects have made architecture too
complex. We need to simplify it and
use a language that everyone can
understand.
Toyo Ito
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

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
But I absolutely believe that
architecture is a social activity that
has to do with some sort of
communication or places of
interaction, and that to change the
environment is to change behaviour.
Thom Mayne

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
The principle of the Gothic
architecture is infinity made
imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All the revision in the world will not
save a bad first draft: for the
architecture of the thing comes, or
fails to come, in the first conception,
and revision only affects the detail and
ornament, alas!
T. E. Lawrence
Each new situation requires a new
architecture.
Jean Nouvel

to make those sentiments more

precise.
Adolf Loos
Painting, sculpture and architecture
are finished, but the art habit
continues.
Robert Smithson
No architecture is so haughty as that
which is simple.
John Ruskin
Architects of grandeur are often the
master builders of disillusionment.
Bryant H. McGill
Architecture is basically a container of
something. I hope they will enjoy not
so much the teacup, but the tea.
Yoshio Taniguchi
Color in certain places has the great
value of making the outlines and
structural planes seem more
energetic.
Antoni Gaudi
Light, God's eldest daughter, is a
principal beauty in a building.
Thomas Fuller
Space has always been the
spiritual dimension of architecture. It is
not the physical statement of the
structure so much as what it contains
that moves us.
Arthur Erickson
Great buildings that move the spirit
have always been rare. In every case
they are unique, poetic, products of
the heart.
Arthur Erickson

Nothing requires the architect's care

more than the due proportions of
buildings.
Vitruvius

Buildings should serve people, not the

other way around.
John Portman

Architecture arouses sentiments in

man. The architect's task therefore, is

Architecture is invention.
Oscar Niemeyer

I don't divide architecture, landscape

and gardening; to me they are one.
Luis Barragan
Bridges are perhaps the most invisible
form of public architecture.
Bruce Jackson
The ancient Romans built their
greatest masterpieces of architecture,
their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to
fight in.
Voltaire
The building's identity resided in the
ornament.
Louis Sullivan
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi
A building has integrity just like a man.
And just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
To work in architecture you are so
much involved with society, with
politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very
complicated process to do large
projects. You start to see the society,
how it functions, how it works. Then
you have a lot of criticism about how it
works.
Ai Weiwei
The loftier the building, the deeper
must the foundation be laid.
Thomas a Kempis
A structure becomes architectural, and
not sculptural, when its elements no
longer have their justification in
nature.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Cities are the greatest creations of
humanity.
Daniel Libeskind

As architects we are often involved in

the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of
it, but cities are social structures, and
to be involved in imagining the future
of cities and the type of relationships
and the types of places that we're
making is something that intrigues me
very much.
Michael Arad
We require from buildings two kinds of
goodness: first, the doing their
practical duty well: then that they be
graceful and pleasing in doing it.
John Ruskin
Architecture is not an inspirational
business, it's a rational procedure to
do sensible and hopefully beautiful
things; that's all.
Harry Seidler
The Romans were not inventors of the
supporting arch, but its extended use
in vaults and intersecting barrel
shapes and domes is theirs.
Harry Seidler
Every building is a prototype. No two
are alike.
Helmut Jahn
As a designer, the mission with which
we have been charged is simple:
providing space at the right cost.
Harry von Zell
Proportions are what makes the old
Greek temples classic in their beauty.
They are like huge blocks, from which
the air has been literally hewn out
between the columns.
Arne Jacobsen
They can do without architecture who
have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
Henry David Thoreau

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.
Martha Graham
Even though I build buildings and I
pursue my architecture, I pursue it as
an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny

studio. I don't want to be an

architectural firm. I want to remain an
artist.
Maya Lin
We build buildings which are terribly
restless. And buildings don't go
anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.
Minoru Yamasaki