Architecture Quotes

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
Architecture
Apollinaire, Guillaume
1880-1918 Italian-born French Poet Critic

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.
Architecture
Banks-Smith, Nancy

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
Architecture
Barrett, Colleen C.

Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?
Architecture
Bayley, Stephen
1951 British Design Critic

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Architecture
Bierce, Ambrose
1842-1914 American Author Editor Journalist The Devil’s Dictionary

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Architecture
Brancusi, Constantin
1876-1957 Romanian Sculptor

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.
Architecture
Charles, Prince Of Wales
1948 Duke of Edinburgh Son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Architecture
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
Architecture
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Architecture
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
1772-1834 British Poet Critic Philosopher

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.
Architecture
Cruickshank, Dan

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
Architecture
Dali, Salvador
1904-1989 Spanish Painter

The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.
Architecture
Erskine, Ralph

Don’t fight forces, use them.
Architecture
Fuller, R. Buckminster
1895-1983 American Inventor Designer Poet Philosopher

Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
Architecture
Fuller, Thomas
1608-1661 British Clergyman Author

A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.
Architecture
Gropius, Walter
1883-1969 German Architect

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Architecture
Gropius, Walter
1883-1969 German Architect

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.
Architecture
Haydon, Benjamin
1786-1846 British Artist

Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.
Architecture
Jellicoe, Sir Geoffrey

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
Architecture
Johnson, Philip
1906 American Architect and Theorist

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Architecture
Johnson, Philip
1906 American Architect and Theorist

I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
Architecture
Lichtenstein, Roy
1923 American Artist

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
Architecture
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
1819-1892 American Poet

Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell.
Architecture
Milton, John
1608-1674 British Poet

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.
Architecture
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1844-1900 German Philosopher

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
Architecture
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
Architecture
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist

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.
Architecture
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
Architecture
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
Architecture
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist

Architecture is petrified music.
Architecture
Schelling, Felix E.
1858-1945 American Educator

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.
Architecture
Seneca
4 BC � 65 AD Spanish-born Roman Statesman philosopher

It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.
Architecture
Spengler, Oswald
1880-1936 German Philosopher

Form ever follows function.
Architecture
Sullivan, Louis Henry

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
Architecture
Thoreau, Henry David
1817-1862 American Essayist Poet Naturalist

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.
Architecture
White, E(lwyn) B(rooks)
1899-1985 American Author Editor

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.
Architecture
Wolfe, Thomas
1931 American Author Journalist

All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.
Architecture
Wright, Frank Lloyd
1869-1959 American Architect

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Architecture
Wright, Frank Lloyd
1869-1959 American Architect

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Wright, Frank Lloyd
1869-1959 American Architect

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