top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Architect
"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."
35
"In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building."
34
"One of the things I thought a lot about was how can we get the views, for instance, the main plaza, you look up to Telegraph Hill from there and therefore it would be a disaster to close that view off."
34
"You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!"
34
"My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness."
34
"Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe."
34
"Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference."
34
"The artistic taste of the Catholic priests is appalling and I am most anxious to have a Catholic church in which everything is genuine and good, and not tawdry and ostentatious."
33
"So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture."
33
"Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less."
33
"It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building."
32
"I don't believe in morality in architecture."
32
"As you can probably tell, I like films and directors that bring a totally unique style to filming action."
32
"I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect."
32
"The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens."
32
"It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building."
31
"True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is."
31
"With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama."
31
"I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened."
31
"You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us."
31
"And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time."
31
"There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons."
31
"I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more."
31
"Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity."
30
bottom of page