I present the largest collection in of sentences, architecture quotes and aphorisms.
Architecture Quotes And Sayings
Table of Contents
Architecture is the skilful, rigorous and magnificent play of volumes assembled in the light.
(Le Corbusier)
Architecture is the testimony of man’s aspiration to overcome time by raising order in space.
(Hermann Broch)
Architecture is a fact of art, a phenomenon that arouses emotion, beyond the problems of construction, beyond them.
Construction is to keep up: Architecture is to move.
(Le Corbusier)
You cannot think of architecture without thinking of people.
(Richard Rogers)
Everyone must like the house.
Unlike the work of art that does not need to please anyone.
(Adolf Loos)
The designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when he has nothing more to add but when he has nothing left to take away.
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
That of the architect is an ancient craft such as hunting, fishing, cultivating and exploring. After the search for food comes the search for a home. At a certain point, the man, dissatisfied with the refuges offered by nature, became an architect.
(Renzo Piano)
Architecture is the adaptation of forms to opposing forces.
(architecture quotes by John Ruskin)
Architecture is nothing but balance.
(Anonymous)
Space, light, order. These are things that men need, like they need bread or a place to sleep.
(Le Corbusier)
Every architecture is great after dark: perhaps architecture is truly a night art, like that of fireworks.
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
The architect starts where the engineer ends.
(Walter Gropius)
As long as the force of gravity does not abandon this land, there will always be a need for cultured architects who know how to build.
(Anonymous)
A bad book can not be read; bad music can not be listened to; but we see the ugly apartment building in front of us.
(Renzo Piano)
Our job is to give the customer not what he wanted but what he never dreamed of
(Denys Ladsun)
Architecture is the great book of humanity.
(Victor Hugo)
What is more important? A kilo of stone or a kilo of gold?
Seems like a ridiculous question. Only to the merchant though. The artist will reply: for me, all materials are equally precious.
(Adolf Loos)
Architecture begins where two stones are carefully superimposed.
(architecture quotes by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe)
When asked what I believe in, I answer that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.
(Richard Meier)
The architectural work is not only the object, but also what surrounds it and the voids, the spaces.
(Oscar Niemeyer)
Architecture is the will of the time translated into space.
(Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe)
Architecture is the way man has tried to inhabit the earth, to protect himself from the weather, but above all to make his existence evident.
(Paolo Portoghesi)
At the base of Architecture is always a moral problem: at the base of our profession there are only duties. From the awareness of the problems, and only from here, the architect will be able to draw the forms that will adhere to the ways of life of his society. From the awareness of the problems he will draw the invention of new forms, which will generate new ways of life.
(Franco Albini)
Architecture lives while art looks; this is a fundamental difference. Architecture is a physical and sensory experience because you go inside it.
(Ettore Sottsass)
If I had to teach you architecture? really a difficult question … I would start by prohibiting orders, putting an end to this paperless nonsense of orders, an incredible challenge to intelligence. I would insist on true respect for architecture. On the other hand, I would tell my students how moving are the things of the Acropolis of Athens, of which they will later understand the greater greatness. I would promise to explain the magnificence of Palazzo Farnese and the vast spiritual gulf that extends between the apses and the facade of San Pietro, both rigorously built with the same “order”, however one by Michelangelo and the other by Alberti (sic) – and I would speak of many other facts, the simplest and most true of architecture, whose understanding requires some competence. I would insist that nobility, purity,
(architecture quotes by Le Corbusier)
He always designs something considering it in its largest context, a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in the environment, the environment in a city project.
(Eliel Saarinen)
Architecture is the art of arranging and adorning buildings, raised by man for any purpose, so that their simple view can contribute to health, strength, enjoyment of the spirit.
(John Ruskin)
Architecture is music in space, a sort of frozen music.
(Friedrich Schelling)
Architecture is empty, it’s up to you to define it.
(Luigi Snozzi)
Architecture is an inhabited sculpture.
(Constantin Brâncuşi)
If I weren’t an optimist, it would be impossible for me to be an architect.
(Norman Foster)
The starting point is the tension towards beauty, towards art, so that surprise, amazement, the unexpected are also part of the architectural work.
(Oscar Niemeyer)
There are works from the past, certain churches, certain buildings, which are used differently today, have survived while changing their function: we still use them today, we frequent them. This happens because what is left is not the utility they had at the time, but the beauty; beauty and poetry have survived time.
(Oscar Niemeyer)
Architecture is not, cannot, must not be an exclusively personal art. It is a collective art. The authentic architect is an entire people. It provides the means for construction, indicates its purpose and makes it unitary. Imagine a city built by ‘genius’ architects, who each operate on their own with a different personal style. The buildings may also be magnificent taken individually, but the whole will be bizarre and intolerable.
(architecture quotes by José Ortega y Gasset)
The idea of an architect is never just formal. It must be social, scientific and poetic at the same time.
(Renzo Piano)
The purpose of architecture is to protect and improve man’s life on earth, to satisfy his belief in the nobility of his existence.
(Eliel Saarinen)
Painting acts on two dimensions, although it may suggest three or four. Sculpture acts on three dimensions, but man remains outside, separated, looks at the three dimensions from outside. Architecture, on the other hand, is like a large sculpture carved into the interior of which man enters and walks.
(Bruno Zevi)
In every good architecture there is a common denominator, the relationship between space and human scale. In the architecture of the last centuries, it doesn’t matter who the author is – Borromini, Bernini, Bramante, Alvar Aalto, Michelangelo, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Louis Kahn – it’s always about the quality of the spaces through which we we move and how the individual relates to them.
(Richard Meier)
If you work in series, you are not an architect but a worker: and this is because from my point of view, architecture is invention, and as an invention it is art.
(Oscar Niemeyer)
The facts of human life, public or private, are so intimately related to architecture that most observers can reconstruct the nations or individuals in all the reality of their habits from the remains of public monuments or from the examination of their relics household.
(Honoré de Balzac)
Architecture is nothing but order, arrangement, beautiful appearance, the proportion of the parts between them, convenience and distribution.
(Michelangelo Buonarroti)
Architecture is too important to be left to architects.
(Giancarlo De Carlo)
Architect. Person who draws a project of your home and designs drawings on your money.
(architecture quotes by Ambrose Bierce)
There are big differences in building in Italy. One is the time. There is the time of New York, the time of Tokyo and then there is the Italian time. It took twelve years for the Ara Pacis because it was a political game. But politics wasn’t about building, it was just about politics as such
(Richard Meier)
I’m always looking for more light and space.
(Santiago Calatrava)
The urban planning materials are the sun, the trees, the sky, the steel, the concrete, in this hierarchical and indissoluble order.
(Le Corbusier)
The architect is a bricklayer who knows Latin.
(Adolf Loos)
A world that sees art and engineering as uniforms is not seeing the world as a whole.
(Sir Edmund Happold)
I am particularly fond of concrete, symbol of the construction of an entire century, submissive and strong as an elephant, monumental as stone, humble as brick.
(Carlos Villanueva)
Architecture is the perennial struggle between man and nature, the struggle to overwhelm nature, to take possession of it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a natural state of nature into a cultural state; it is a sacred act.
(architecture quotes by Mario Botta)
A good solution in architecture always clearly expresses the problem from which it moves. His problem, his reason for being.
(Giorgio Grassi)
Architecture is the art of wasting space.
(Philip Johnson)
I like ruins because what remains is not the complete design, but the essentiality of thought, the bare structure, the spirit of the thing.
(Tadao Ando)
The decorator’s art consists in doing in the homes of others what one would never dream of doing in one’s own.
(Le Corbusier)
On the wood-rich mountains it will be built with wood, on the mountain hairless stone it will be built in stone; in some places brick will be cheaper, in others cement. Modern is always the cheapest material. Today there is a widespread mistake among those who fetishistically believe that only concrete and iron are modern materials.
(Adolf Loos)
Architecture cannot be reduced to anything other than an unsolvable dialectic of necessity and freedom.
(Francesco Dal Co)
In this real battle of technology, one must above all not lose sight of the objectives. there are two, first: to offer in the silence, solitude, and in front of the sun, the space, the greenery, an accommodation that is the ideal environment for a family; second: to build in the nature of the Good God, under the sky and in the face of the sun, a masterful architectural work, made of rigor, grandeur, noble, smile and elegance.
(Le Corbusier)
Architecture is truly wellness. I think people want to feel good in a space … On the one hand it is a shelter, on the other it is also a pleasure.
(Zaha Hadid)
Architecture is basically the ritual of appropriating places, building to stay.
(Livio Vacchini)
Architects spend an entire life with this strange idea of fighting against the law of gravity.
(Renzo Piano)
Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and soil elements. It is based on wonder.
(Daniel Libeskind)
Architecture is a mixture of nostalgia and extreme anticipation.
(Jean Baudrillard)
Never speak to an architectural client. Talk to him about his children. This is really a good policy. He won’t understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time.
(Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)
Architecture, the most misunderstood and forgotten of the arts of today, is perhaps also the most mysterious and the most nourished by ideas
(architecture quotes by Guy de Maupassant)
Architecture something tangled between beauty and power
(Fernando Menendez)
Architecture is a harmonious composition of elements in space to correspond to a specific practical purpose.
(Ernesto N. Rogers)
He must be the architect, who will possess at least these four sciences, namely Grammar, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Perspective, and some part of Philosophy, and who is still inclined to always study, and invent ec.
(Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola)
Space, space: architects always talk about space! But creating a space doesn’t automatically mean architecture. With the same space, it is possible to make a masterpiece or cause a disaster.
(Jean Nouvel)
Architecture is sublimation of the necessities of life: it is art that defines time in space.
(Ernesto N. Rogers)
Any architectural work that does not express serenity is an error.
(Luis Barragán)
What is often missing in contemporary architecture is now a link with history and geography.
(Jean Nouvel)
If nature had been comfortable, humanity would never have invented architecture.
(Oscar Wilde)
A place is endowed with quality when, in some way appropriate to the person and his culture, he makes the individual aware of belonging to a community, of his own history, of the unfolding of life, and of the space-time universe that encompasses everything what.
(Kevin Lynch)
I will call the architect who will know with certain and marvelous reason, and rule, yes with the mind, and with the soul to divide.
(Leon Battista Alberti)
Architecture is not an art, since anything that serves a purpose must be excluded from the sphere of art.
(Adolf Loos)
Only a very small part of the architecture belongs to art: the sepulcher and the monument.
(Adolf Loos)
The principle of Gothic architecture is that of infinity made imaginable.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The city is a wonderful emotion of man. The city is an invention, indeed: it is the invention of man.
(Renzo Piano)
Architecture, the most misunderstood and forgotten of the arts of today, is perhaps also the most mysterious and the most nourished by ideas.
(Guy de Maupassant)
Today’s builders have poor skills, but they don’t even do what they are capable of.
(J. Ruskin)
Each material has a formal language that belongs to it and no material can call upon itself the forms that correspond to another material …
(Adolf Loos)
Architecture is a kind of oratory of power by means of forms.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
Architecture is a frontier art. Only if you accept the challenge of being contaminated does it have reason to exist. Otherwise it’s lounge stuff.
(Renzo Piano)
Architecture becomes generous and meaningful to humans only if it is a gentle and delicate extension of the natural order.
(Giancarlo De Carlo)
Architecture is measured by the eye and the step, the meter by the surveyor.
(Luigi Snozzi)
Without paradoxes it can be said that architecture is precisely the “most useful” building, since, in addition to the practical destination and the technical organism, it reflects the psychological and spiritual use.
(Bruno Zevi)
In this regard, the architect has the most singular fate. How many times does he use all his ingenuity and his passion to create environments, from which he must exclude himself! The halls of kings owe their magnificence to him, but he does not enjoy the effect.
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
An architect, although he uses colossal blocks and heavy pillars, is the most refined of artists.
(architecture quotes by Henry James)
The beauty of being an architect is that you can walk in your dreams.
(Harold Wagoner)
Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. It must be the original interpreter of his time, his epoch, his moment.
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
The difference between a good architect and a bad architect today lies in the fact that the latter succumbs to all temptations, while the other resists them.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
I hate holidays. If it is possible to build buildings, why sit on the beach?
(architecture quotes by Philip Johnson)
I believe that in the near future we will 3D print our buildings and houses.
(Neri Oxman)
A doctor can always bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant an American vine.
(architecture quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright)