quotations about architecture
The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature -- art can go no further.
LEW WALLACE
Ben-Hur
Finally, architecture is bigger than buildings in the same way the city is; it concerns the production and dissemination of knowledge as much as it does embodied energy.
SAMUEL MEDINA
"Bigger Than Buildings", Metropolis, March 14, 2016
Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Ideas and Integrities
As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, Sep. 1836
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
KARL MARX
Das Kapital
Architecture nowadays is presented in a packaged, completed and standardized format that suits the needs of the norm.
YUN ZHANG
"Coy Howard, interviewed by SCI-Arc students: part 2 of 3", Archinect, March 16, 2016
A house can have integrity, just like a person ... and just as seldom.
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.
JOHN PREBBLE
Disaster at Dundee
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.
VICTOR HUGO
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
I don't know what London's coming to -- the higher the buildings the lower the morals.
NOEL COWARD
Collected Sketches and Lyrics
Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this enviroment produces well being.
LUIS BARRAGÁN
attributed, iDesign
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
PHILIP JOHNSON
New York Times, Dec. 27, 1964
The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.
GEORGES BATAILLE
"Architecture"
Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Complete Essays: 1926-1929
I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
LUIS BARRAGAN
attributed, The Complete Guide to Building Your Own Greenhouse
I'm not interested in living in a fantasy world ... All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.
LEBBEUS WOODS
LEBBEUS WOODS, "An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World", New York Times, Aug. 25, 2008
Architecture begins where engineering ends.
WALTER GROPIUS
attributed, And I Quote
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Truth Against the World
Architecture aims at Eternity.
CHRISTOPHER WREN
Parentalia