Architecture Quotes

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

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

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

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!

Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

A house is a machine for living in.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.