top of page
Quotes by Architect

"In Europe, architects consider themselves artists. They think they're special when they win a competition."

"Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less."

"So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent."


"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."

"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."

"In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building."

"Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression."

"In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function."

"If you examine this, I think that you will find that it's the mechanics of Japanese architecture that have been thought of as the direct influence upon our architecture."

"Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built."

"Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community."

"Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city."

"We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated."

"Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes."

"My brother Jim and I saw our father go into the jails and pray with the inmates Sunday after Sunday. He prayed with both blacks and whites. If we ever repeated any slurs we heard on the playground, he'd tell us very softly, "I don't want to hear those words.""

"When a project has an ample budget, I am interested now in using bigger units of materials."

"Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart."

"And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important."

"And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture."

"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."

"It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work."

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

"The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely."


"The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act."

"The permanent power brokers of this city are the columnists."

"There will be a competition for the memorial. And then it can be developed with trees, with planting. It can become a very beautiful place protected from the streets, because it is below. And it can be something very moving and very private."

"I think the younger generation, the people poised to dominate the workforce, are more socially conscious. They are more demanding in terms of environment and how that environment contributes to their life."

"The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom."

"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."

"The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning."

"I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away."

"Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany."

"The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference."

"The plastic on your sandwich really doesn't have to be made to last 50 years."

"The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind."

"Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head."
Work,

"The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods."
bottom of page