“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.”
Buildings shape how we live, work, and think. These quotes from architects, designers, and urban thinkers explore the relationship between structure and human experience — how the spaces we create end up creating us in return.
“Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.”
“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.”
“Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.”
“The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.”
“If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.”
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
“The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.”
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“I'd like to do a lot of things - whether in design or architecture or business.”
“Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.”
“Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.”
“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.”
“All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.”
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
“I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.”
“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.”