Quotes on architecture

• All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
• Architecture is how to waste space.
• The city is subject to growth, decay, and renewal.
• Architects today depreciate themselves, regarding themselves as ordinary citizens without power to reform the future.
• "Form follows beauty."

Oscar Niemeyer

• Architecture will express the technical and social progress of the country it's in.
• To give architecture human content, participation in political struggle is needed.

Frank Gehry

• Architecture has too many excuses, blaming clients, cities, or budgets.
• Architecture should speak of its time and place yet yearn for timelessness.

Robert Venturi

• Forms accommodate function.
• Less is bore.
• Unity disguised as chaos with complexity and contradiction makes art exciting and profound.
• Architecture inspires people to use their resources, moving into the future.
• Without a certain spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist.
• Architecture reconciles the mismatch between logic and the spirit of Modernism.
• Architects spend their lives with the unreasonable idea to fight against gravity.
• Each situation requires new architecture.
• Architecture has to be a gift.
• Dealing with separated problems is dangerous in architecture because it splits life and possibilities for good building art.
• Only a small part of architecture belongs to art: tombs and monuments.
• Everything else that fulfills a function is excluded from art.
• Ornament is a crime and must be rejected.
• Form does not necessarily follow function.
• Truth is indispensable to architecture and architectural lie concepts.
• "A building is the combination of different geometric figures."
• Architects of the future are victims, starting with holes.
• Drawing architecture is a schizoid act, reducing the world into a piece of paper.
• Function influences but does not dictate form.
• Architecture is where form equals social form.
• "Beauty grows from necessity not from repetition of formulas."

Erich Mendelsohn

• "Architecture seizes upon space, encompasses space, and is space itself."
• "Architecture depends on the sensuous seizure by means of touch and sight."
• Big plans should be made, aiming high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded won't die.
• Make no little plans; they lack magic to stir mens blood.
• Every great architect is necessarily a great poet, an original interpreter of their time.
• Architecture is organic.

Frank Lloyd Wright

• The longer one lives, the more beautiful life becomes.
• Ignoring beauty leads to impoverishment, investing in beauty makes it remain.
• Reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
• An idea is salvation by imagination.
• Form and function are one.
• No architecture can be truly noble if imperfect.
• It is impossible to restore anything great or beautiful in architecture once its gone.
• The spirit given only by the workman's hand and eye can never be recalled.
• The house is a machine for living in.
• Architecture or Revolution is possible.
• The exterior of the building is the result of the interior.
• Architecture reaches out for the truth.
• Expressive architecture in colleges reassures students that they have that mind and soul.
• "A house is a house."

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:

• Forms follows function.
• Less is more.
• Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
• God is in the details.
• It is better to be good than original.
• Less is more, almost.
• One is neither a capitalist nor a socialist, religious nor atheist.
• Each one sees what they wish to see.
• Architecture is a social art.
• Architecture must meet 3 requirements: Strength, Beauty, and Utilities.
• Architecture is a science from many other sciences, adorned with varied learning.
• Judgment forms works which result from other arts.
• The reality of a building isn't the container but the space within.
• The architect molds men, whether they consciously assume responsibility or not.
• Nature with a capital N is spelled like God with a capital G.
• Organic architecture relates all parts to the whole with continuity and integrity.
• "Architecture is a synthesis of technology and art."
• Structural correctness is identical to functional, technical, and economic truthfulness.
• Architecture must have liberty of forms.
• Modern architecture need not be western.
• Symbolisms and blasphemies exist.
• Architecture is the expression of the past.
• Design is how, form is what.
• Nothing impractical can be beautiful.
• Essential basis of natural forms are geometries.
• Humanism matters.
• Design as if you are a child.
• Classical forms language of both the arcuated and trabeated models.
• Ornament equals crime.
• Lift the building in the ground.
• Modern ideas in modern dress.
• Design by living men for living men.
• Mushroom slab construction makes a bridge like a house.
• Fluid mass theory states that architecture is the only tangible expression of space.
• Spiritual function is inseparable from practical function.
• Beauty grows from necessity, not from repetition.
• "A house is like a flower pot."
• Most important material is man.
• The client is chaos.
• Integrate cheapness to create sublime conditions.
• A town in a town is possible.
• Form is the mystery defying description yet brings people pleasure.
• A cube within a cube exists.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret)

• "Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light."
• "Space and light and order are what men need just as much as bread or a place to sleep."
• "The styles are a lie."
• Straight lines belong to man, curved lines belong to God.
• Nature and architecture are different things.
• Art and architecture, the new unity.
• Machine is our modern medium of design.
• "Architecture built not for need, but for art."
• "Automobile is the most important organizing element in the structure"
• Architecture is invention.
• Supply and demand regulate architecture form.
• Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.
• Architecture begins where engineering ends.
• Buildings have straight geometrical lines and studied lines that did not spring up simultaneously.