top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Architect
"People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish."
9
"After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings."
9
"It doesn't worry me that people have criticised the building."
9
"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean."
9
"My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience."
9
"To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it."
9
"If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it."
9
"When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space."
9
"When a project has an ample budget, I am interested now in using bigger units of materials."
9
"And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important."
9
"An idea is salvation by imagination."
9
"When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed."
Now,
9
"And you have to remember that I came to America as an immigrant. You know, on a ship, through the Statue of Liberty. And I saw that skyline, not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as really the substance of the American Dream."
9
"One is, that they will feel about you that you're going to make something wonderful for them. And they help you by expressing themselves. Not telling you how to do it, but encouraging you and accepting your vision and working with you on that kind of a level."
9
"Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture."
9
"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."
9
"Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it."
9
"The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line."
9
"Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them."
9
"In the Scottish Orkneys, the little stone houses with their single large room and central hearth had an extraordinary range of built-in furniture."
9
"The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach."
9
"Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?"
9
"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art."
9
"The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning."
8
"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."
8
"Bodies which contain a greater proportion of water than is necessary to balance the other elements, are speedily corrupted, and lose their virtues and properties."
8
"Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings."
8
"An important work of architecture will create polemics."
8
"In the crowded and difficult conditions of a steep hillside, houses have had to struggle to establish their territory and to survive."
8
"The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before."
8
"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."
8
"The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods."
8
"At the age of 80, I'm becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth."
8
"I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?"
8
"Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within."
8
"Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture."
8
"The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models."
8
"The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization."
8
bottom of page