soME INteREsting QUotes by SOme famOUS and SomE unKNOwn archiTECTs.
- Style is trendy and fleeting. Bad taste is timeless.
Anonymous - Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in. (on using a grid)
Frank Gehry - The scary cousin in architecture's dysfunctional family (on Frank Gehry)
Zev Borrow - When a building is as good as that one, fuck the art. (On Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim as a place to experience art)
Philip Johnson - Ram-shack-le /'ram-shak-el/ adj. : Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.
Ambrose Bierce - Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson - 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.
Frank Lloyd Wright - Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon.
Bruno Zevi - Ignorance transcends architecture.
James Gaskin - The most important question when any new architecture is introduced is "So what?"
Anonymous - When does a building actually become a built?
Le Corbusier - ar-chi-tect \är-ke-,tekt\ n. One who believes that conception comes before erection.
Rob Daly - Home is where you hang your Architect.
Clare Booth Luce - Q: What would I do if I won a million dollars?
A: Probably just keep practicing architecture till it was gone.
The Management - We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.
Sir Winston Churchill - The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor - Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
Thomas Fuller - Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.
Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe - All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
Philip Johnson - I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
Roy Lichtenstein - Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest art of all the arts.
Painting and sculpture are but images,
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
Existing in itself, and not in seeming
A something it is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic _expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
Tom Wolfe - No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
John Ruskin - No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
John Ruskin - Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E.B.White - Form ever follows function.
Louis Henry Sullivan - Less is more
Mies - Less is a bore.
Robert Venturi - Less is more work.
Patric McCue - Less is more, except when it is not enough...
unknown - True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
Henry David Thoreau - In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.
Nancy Banks-Smith - The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright - All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.
Frank Lloyd Wright - Architecture is "frozen music"... Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Ludwig Van Beethoven - Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?
Nancy Banks-Smith - Use your eyes; plagiarize. (On borrowing design strategies from other cultures.)
Steven Ehrlich - Liberate the perimeter for the people! (On pushing the managers towards the core so that everybody can share the view in high rise offices.)
Laura Hartman - Architecture is easy: you just stare at the paper until droplets of blood appear on your forehead.
Unknown - Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce - You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.
Charles, Prince of Wales - But what if we are dealing with fools? (On design juries)
Mies - Commodity, firmness, delight...
Vitruvius - Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.
Seneca
