Architecture Quotes

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

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.

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

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.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.

I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I'd done theatricals in college, but I'd done them because it was fun.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

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

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

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

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.