ARCHITECTURE QUOTES
quotations about architecture
If there's going to be another movement, another direction in architecture, it has to engage people differently. Other than saying, here, look at this, isn't this amazing? It has to interactively involve them other than as spectators ... it has to engage them as creators.
LEBBEUS WOODS
"Subtopia Meets Lebbeus Woods", Subtopia, 2007
Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
speech delivered to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, 1950
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
FRANK GEHRY
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech to the House of Commons, Oct. 28, 1943
A house is a machine for living in.
LE CORBUSIER
attributed, Architectural Digest
The architects who benefit us most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
New York Times, Oct. 4, 1953
A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.
LEBBEUS WOODS
"The Reality of Experimental Architecture: an Interview with Lebbeus Woods", Carnegie Online, July/August 2004
Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.
JOHN PORTMAN
attributed, Architectural Digest
One might regard architecture as history arrested in stone.
A. L. ROWSE
The Use of History
Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.
HORACE WALPOLE
Horace Walpole's Miscellany
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Life oscillates between very concrete dimensions -- to have a shelter, to not be cold, to be able to live together at a certain proximity -- but also questions of the essence of human existence. Architecture has to solve basic problems, but also explore the potentiality of things.
ALEJANDRO ARAVENA
"Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016: 'Reporting From the Front'", Blouin Artinfo, February 23, 2016
A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
attributed, Themes and Episodes
All architecture is great architecture after sunset.
G.K. CHESTERTON
"The Giant", Tremendous Trifles
The way human beings see themselves in relation to nature is fundamental to all cultures; thus the first fact of architecture is the natural world, the second is the relationship of human structures to the topography of the world, and the third is the relationship of all these structures to each other, comprising the human community as a whole. The question of the relationship of the manmade to the natural world is especially germane today for many reasons. The most obvious and surely the most important one is the threat to the existence of the natural environment itself that many kinds of human structures now pose.
VINCENT JOSEPH SCULLY
Modern Architecture and Other Essays
The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded, with his own, into the walls,
As offerings unto God.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Christus: The Golden Legend
The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.
WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI
The Most Beautiful House in the World
I call architecture frozen music.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
letter to Johann Peter Eckermann, Mar. 23, 1829