Quotes about architecture

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

— Guillaume Apollinaire

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

— Nancy Banks-Smith

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.

— Colleen C. Barrett

Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?

— Stephen Bayley

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

— Ambrose Bierce

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

— Constantin Brancusi

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

— Prince Of Wales Charles

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, high-tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit -- if totally different in form -- from all the romantic architecture of the past.

— Dan Cruickshank

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

— Salvador Dali

The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.

— Ralph Erskine

Don't fight forces, use them.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

— Thomas Fuller

A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.

— Walter Gropius

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

— Walter Gropius

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.

— Benjamin Haydon

Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.

— Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

— Philip Johnson

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

— Philip Johnson

I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.

— Roy Lichtenstein

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell.

— John Milton

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

— John Ruskin

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!

— John Ruskin

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

— John Ruskin

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

— John Ruskin

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

— John Ruskin

Architecture is petrified music.

— Felix E. Schelling

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

— Seneca

It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.

— Oswald Spengler

Form ever follows function.

— Louis Henry Sullivan

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

— Henry David Thoreau

Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

— Elwyn Brooks White

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

— Thomas Wolfe

All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

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

— Frank Lloyd Wright

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

Oh Rat's

— Frank Lloyd Wright