Welcome to the world of Architecture Quotes, where the profound words of architects, designers, and visionaries come together to inspire, educate, and ignite your passion for the built environment. Architecture is not merely about bricks and mortar; it is a symphony of creativity, innovation, and functionality. It shapes the way we live, work, and experience the world around us. Through the lens of these insightful quotes, we invite you to explore the multifaceted realm of architecture and gain a deeper understanding of its significance in our lives.
Below, you will find a curated collection of thought-provoking quotes from renowned architects and design thinkers. These words capture the essence of architectural philosophy, the principles that guide the creation of iconic structures, and the timeless wisdom that architects have shared throughout history. Whether you are a professional architect, a design enthusiast, or simply someone intrigued by the power of architecture, you can use these quotes to spark your creativity, share your love for the built environment, or adorn your projects with inspiring words. Discover, reflect, and enjoy!
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in. Voltaire
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs. Harry Seidler
I am but an architectural composer. Alexander Jackson Davis
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. R. Buckminster Fuller
Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea. Yoshio Taniguchi
The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines. Saul Steinberg
Architecture is invention. Oscar Niemeyer
Architecture is the reaching out for the truth. Louis Kahn
Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise. Adolf Loos
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. Ayn Rand
Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life. Peter Zumthor
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It’s a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works. Ai Weiwei
Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us. Arthur Erickson
At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture. Martin Puryear
What people want, above all, is order. Stephen Gardiner
I don’t believe in morality in architecture. Michael Graves
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Martin Mull
Every building is a prototype. No two are alike. Helmut Jahn
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid. Thomas a Kempis
When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature – this very unique to Japan. Tadao Ando
Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times. Richard Rogers
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions. Coco Chanel
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. Robert Smithson
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable. Louis Kahn
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. Salvador Dali
Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future. Kenzo Tange
Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. Samuel Butler
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Audre Lorde
Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it. Arthur Erickson
But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour. Thom Mayne
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. Julia Morgan
Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life. Arne Jacobsen
The building’s identity resided in the ornament. Louis Sullivan
What is now called ‘green architecture’ is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them. Rem Koolhaas
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. Antoni Gaudi
For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind. James Rouse
Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you’ll be: How good are you at going around obstacles? Jeremy Renner
Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great. Enid Nemy
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! T. E. Lawrence
Architecture is inhabited sculpture. Constantin Brancusi
Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns. Arne Jacobsen
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it. John Ruskin
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist. Maya Lin
I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me. Maya Lin
We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don’t go anywhere. They shouldn’t be restless. Minoru Yamasaki
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature. Guillaume Apollinaire
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. Gilbert K. Chesterton
The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present. Adolf Loos
I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one. Luis Barragan
Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment. Bryant H. McGill
Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time. Richard Meier
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition. John Portman
To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it. Daniel Libeskind
Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building. Thomas Fuller
I live in a craftsman house, but I’m a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too. Luke Macfarlane
Buildings should serve people, not the other way around. John Portman
Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light. Le Corbusier
Architecture begins where engineering ends. Walter Gropius
Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand. Toyo Ito
I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. Ayn Rand
Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature. Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much. Frei Otto
Whatever good things we build end up building us. Jim Rohn
Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all. Harry Seidler
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Steve Martin
Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England. Stephen Gardiner
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill
It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time. David Allan Coe
Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don’t read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years. Renzo Piano
Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator. Antoni Gaudi
Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart. Arthur Erickson
All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space. Philip Johnson
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things. Rem Koolhaas
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I see music as fluid architecture. Joni Mitchell
Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design. Stephen Gardiner
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. Daniel Burnham
The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams. Robert A. M. Stern
No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical. Michael Ende
A house is a machine for living in. Le Corbusier
I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect. Alexander Jackson Davis
To me, a building – if it’s beautiful – is the love of one man, he’s made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that. Martha Graham
Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real. Frank Stella
I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people. Donna Karan
Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being. Luis Barragan
Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. Frank Lloyd Wright
My buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone. Julia Morgan
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. Gilbert K. Chesterton
Form follows function. Louis Sullivan
Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together. Alvar Aalto
As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we’re making is something that intrigues me very much. Michael Arad
I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think. Zaha Hadid
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple. John Ruskin
In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives. Bjarke Ingels
Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building. John Osborne
Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man. Mario Botta
I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more. Thom Mayne
A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive. Helmut Jahn
The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history. Russell Lynes
Architecture aims at Eternity. Christopher Wren
