Architecture Quotes

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is petrified music.

Felix E. Schelling

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Thom Mayne

Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell.

John Milton

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

Maya Lin

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

Stephen Gardiner

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

Russell Lynes

I see music as fluid architecture.

Joni Mitchell

Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.

Catherine Deneuve

In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.

Alain Robert

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Less is more" is said to have been one of the favorite maxims of architect Mies Van der Rohe.

Albert Camus

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

Kurt Vonnegut

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

Louis Kahn

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

Thom Mayne

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

T. E. Lawrence

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

Ai Weiwei