ARCHITECTURE QUOTES

quotations about architecture

Architecture quote

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

Tags: Lebbeus Woods


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

Tags: history


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

FRANK GEHRY

attributed, The Quotable Intellectual

Tags: time


We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

speech to the House of Commons, Oct. 28, 1943

Tags: Winston Churchill


A house is a machine for living in.

LE CORBUSIER

attributed, Architectural Digest

Tags: machines


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

Tags: Frank Lloyd Wright


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

Tags: Lebbeus Woods, society


One might regard architecture as history arrested in stone.

A. L. ROWSE

The Use of History

Tags: A. L. Rowse, history


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


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

Tags: Horace Walpole


They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Walden

Tags: Henry David Thoreau, wine


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

Tags: Ezra Pound


Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

attributed, Themes and Episodes

Tags: Constantin Brancusi


All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

G.K. CHESTERTON

"The Giant", Tremendous Trifles

Tags: G. K. Chesterton


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

Tags: nature


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

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.

WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

The Most Beautiful House in the World

Tags: Witold Rybczynski


I call architecture frozen music.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

letter to Johann Peter Eckermann, Mar. 23, 1829

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, music