top of page
Quotes by Architect

"But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago."

"Everyone has the right to walk from one end of the city to the other in secure and beautiful spaces. Everybody has the right to go by public transport. Everybody has the right to an unhampered view down their street, not full of railings, signs and rubbish."


"The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail."

"It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city."

"Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea."

"Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture."

"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light."

"Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate."


"My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process."

"The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself."

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

"But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance."

"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."

"Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art."

"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture."

"Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being."

"Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved."

"To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects."

"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site."

"Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole."

"All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space."

"An idea is salvation by imagination."

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."

"Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise."

"It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us."

"The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect."

"People buy a chair, and they don't really care who designed it."

"Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic."

"I am moreover inclined to be concise when I reflect on the constant occupation of the citizens in public and private affairs, so that in their few leisure moments they may read and understand as much as possible."

"It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way."


"You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you."
Will,

"The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative."
bottom of page
