ARCHITECTS' QUOTES

A garden must combine the poetic and he mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.
Luis Barragan

Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.
Luis Barragan

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
Luis Barragan

I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.
Luis Barragan

A house is a machine for living in.
Le Corbusier

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Le Corbusier

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
Le Corbusier

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.
Le Corbusier

The home should be the treasure chest of living.
Le Corbusier

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.
Le Corbusier

A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.
William Kent

All gardening is landscape painting.
William Kent

Garden as though you will live forever.
William Kent

Form follows function.
Louis Sullivan

It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building.
Louis Sullivan

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
Frank Lloyd Wright

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
Frank Lloyd Wright

An idea is salvation by imagination.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.
Frank Lloyd Wright

very great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Freedom is from within.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Less is only more where more is no good.
Frank Lloyd Wright

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The space within becomes the reality of the building.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The truth is more important than the facts.
Frank Lloyd Wright

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
Frank Lloyd Wright

"Think simple" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Space is the breath of art.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.
Yoshio Taniguchi

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
Leon Battista Alberti

My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.
Tadao Ando

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.
Tadao Ando

The computer offers another kind of creativity. You cannot ignore the creativity that computer technology can bring. But you need to be able to move between those two different worlds.
Tadao Ando

The level of detail and craft is something that's inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.
Tadao Ando

When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.
Tadao Ando

When I draw something, the brain and the hands work together.
Tadao Ando

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.
Tadao Ando

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.
Christopher Alexander

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.
Christopher Alexander

am but an architectural composer.
Alexander Jackson Davis

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.
Arthur Erickson

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.
Arthur Erickson

Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin.
Antonio Gaudi

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
Antonio Gaudi

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry

Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Walter Gropius
Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.
Walter Gropius

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
Walter Gropius

When we dream alone it is only a dream, but when many dream together it is the beginning of a new reality.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.
Arne Jacobsen

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.
Arne Jacobsen

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

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson
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

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
Louis Kahn

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.
Louis Kahn

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.
Louis Kahn

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
Adolf Loos

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.
Adolf Loos

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
Adolf Loos

And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important.
Minoru Yamasaki

And exciting buildings are fine periodically.
Minoru Yamasaki

And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture.
Minoru Yamasaki

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Less is more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.
Robert A. M. Stern

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you're talking about building a house, you're talking about dreams.
Robert A. M. Stern

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

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.
Thom Mayne