“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.”
Topic
architecture
279 quotes
Quotes, most loved first
“The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.”
“The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.”
“Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.”
“In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.”
“At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.”
“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.”
“The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.”
“Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.”
“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.”
“In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.”
“Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.”
“Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.”
“I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.”
“I am but an architectural composer.”
“As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost.”
“The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
“I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.”
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
“Architecture begins where engineering ends.”
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
“The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.”
“It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.”
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”