Quotes about Architecture

“Architects have created this fake separation between creation and execution. You can see it in architecture schools, where the students look down on going to contracts classes.”

“I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.”

“'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.”

“Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.”

“I truly believe that the great heroes that create the history of architecture are people who take risks and write to tell about it.”

“When I began studying architecture all I ever wanted was an original, black Eames lounge chair.”

“Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.”

“Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates.”

“Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.”

“The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.”

“My architecture is the architecture of survival.”

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

“Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.”

“In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas.”

“Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.”

“Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.”

“I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.”

“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

“Architecture begins where engineering ends.”

“I think it's important to approach a house in a way that's reflective of the original environment. Maybe I'm a sentimentalist, but I think that certain geographies call out for certain architecture. I like residences that reflect their place.”

“Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate.”