Top 300 Most Famous Architecture Quotes of All Time

As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost. -Harry von Zell

In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings. -Delia Ephron

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time. -Richard Meier

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. -Enid Nemy

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around. -John Portman

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

My buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone. -Julia Morgan

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.-Martin Puryear

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.-James Rouse

The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines. -Saul Steinberg

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. -Russell Lynes

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. -Antonio Gaudi

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function. -Michael Graves

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you’ll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?-Jeremy Renner

I could have been an architect, but I don’t think I’d have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.-Roger Waters

I see music as fluid architecture. -Joni Mitchell

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts. -Catherine Deneuve

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Today’s developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.-Arthur Erickson(Architecture Quotes)

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.-Arthur Erickson

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

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

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line. -Arthur Erickson

Architecture theory is very interesting. -David Byrne

Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. -Audre Lorde

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person and in the end they unite. -Havelock Ellis

All real education is the architecture of the soul. -William Bennett

Top Architecture Quotes – 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

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

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design. -Herbert Simon

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. -Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. -Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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

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

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. -Hugo Chavez

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. -Frank Lloyd Wright

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

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple. -John Ruskin

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. -John Ruskin

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. -Frank Lloyd Wright

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. -Salvador Dali

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. -John Ruskin

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. -Arne Jacobsen