Last Updated on September 6, 2024
Architecture is all around us. The process of planning, designing, and constructing is an artform within itself.
Just like we admire historical constructions, architecture plays an important role for future generations to witness our cultural achievements.
The creative manipulation encompasses our intellectual ideas to become a reality with carefully planned drawings, specifications, and structures. If you’re an architecture lover or an aspiring architect, we’ve got a great treat for you.
Today we collected 60 constructive quotes about architecture and architectural design. Enjoy!
“To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.” – Daniel Libeskind
Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
“A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” – Louis Kahn
“In reality some images or drawings have a greater impact than many buildings that are built.” – Emilio Ambasz
“Form ever follows function.” – Louis Henry Sullivan
“A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head.” – Renzo Piano
“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry
“Very often the opinion of the clients must be disregarded in their own interest.” – John M. Johansen
“I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.” – Tadao Ando
“It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.” – Charles Eames
“Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.” – Renzo Piano
“To create, one must first question everything.” – Eileen Gray
“Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” – Yoshio Taniguchi
“Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” – Luis Barragán
“When we build, let us think that we build for ever.” – John Ruskin
“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I’ve finished, if the solution is not beautiful I know it’s wrong.” – Buckminster Fuller
“As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.” – Norman Foster
“Form follows profit – is the aesthetic principle of our times.” – Richard Rogers
“Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. It’s based on wonder.” – Daniel Libeskind
“I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?” – Philip Johnson
“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” – Le Corbusier
“There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular, to look like it is changing the world. I don’t care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.” – David Chipperfield
“Each new situation requires a new architecture.” – Jean Nouvel
“The architecture we remember is that which never consoles or comforts us.” – Peter Eisenman
“If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.” – Arne Jacobsen
“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” – Ernest Hemingway
“The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.” – Ralph Erskine
“Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space… On the one hand it’s about shelter, but it’s also about pleasure.” – Zaha Hadid
“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.” – Le Corbusier
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“Architecture begins where engineering ends.” – Walter Gropius
“There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?” – Zaha Hadid
“I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.” – Luis Barragán
“I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.” – Frank Gehry
“To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.” – Eero Saarinen
“I am trying to counter the fixity of architectures, their stolidity, with elements that give an ineffable immaterial quality.” – Toyo Ito
“We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.” – Glenn Murcutt
“Architecture is not about space but about time.” – Vito Acconci
“One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.” – Renzo Piano
“People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They’re thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work.” – Tom Kundig
“When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.” – Richard Meier
“I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.” – Tadao Ando
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“I love paper. A nice thick pile of it and a pencil, and I’m content.” – Cecil Balmond
“I believe in the near future we will 3D print our buildings and houses.” – Neri Oxman
“Inconsistency itself breeds vitality.” – Kenzo Tange
“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” – Mies van der Rohe
“Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.” – Adolf Loos
“The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made.” – Louis Kahn
“Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.” – Buckminster Fuller
“I always try to think in curves.” – Greg Lynn
“Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.” – Kenzo Tange
“Question everything generally thought to be obvious.” – Dieter Rams
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs
My work is not about “form follows function”, but “form follows beauty” or, even better, “form follows feminine”. – Oscar Niemeyer
‘The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant but minimalism.” – Kevin McCloud
“Buildings should be good neighbours.” – Paul Thiry
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” – Winston Churchill
