Architect's Quotes H-Z

Because over and over again, the times that I've done really good things is because I've had a wonderful client of some kind, and a lot of it depended on me to induce them to be creative.

Lawrence Halprin

When we dream alone it is only a dream, but when many dream together it is the beginning of a new reality.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser


I do not feel certain until I have confronted my initial solution with other solutions - although in fact the first solution often proves to be the right one.

Arne Jacobsen


Higher ceilings allow the use indirect lighting, which is much healthier and reduces glare.

Helmut Jahn


It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Helmut Jahn


Transparency is not the same as looking straight through a building: it's not just a physical idea, it's also an intellectual one.

Helmut Jahn


When I think of some of my earlier work, it really seems a fortunate coincidence that I succeeded.

Helmut Jahn


You'd never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago's Michigan Avenue. But in a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner.

Helmut Jahn


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


I'm about four skyscrapers behind.

Philip Johnson


A good book written for children can be read by adults.

Norton Juster


I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

Norton Juster


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


Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Louis Kahn


Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

Louis Kahn


Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

Louis Kahn


Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

Louis Kahn


A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.

William Kent


Garden as though you will live forever.

William Kent


We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

Rem Koolhaas


And it is very moving because one has to see the site not as just another site of development but it is a very special site. It is a site that souls and hearts of all Americans.

Daniel Libeskind


Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

Daniel Libeskind


I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

Daniel Libeskind


We all came to see that site. We all walked around it. It is already sacred.

Daniel Libeskind


Well, I think one doesn't really have to invent this memorial space, because it is already there. And it is speaking with a voice and, you know, 4 million of us came to see the site.

Daniel Libeskind


A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.

Maya Lin


All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

Maya Lin


Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

Maya Lin


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


Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

Maya Lin


For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

Maya Lin


I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

Maya Lin


It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.

Maya Lin


Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

Maya Lin


Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

Maya Lin


You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

Maya Lin


Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

Adolf Loos


Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.

Adolf Loos


The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

Adolf Loos


There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

Edwin Lutyens


Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.

Thom Mayne


For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

Thom Mayne


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


I've been such an outsider my whole life.

Thom Mayne


I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.

Thom Mayne


Each new situation requires a new architecture.

Jean Nouvel


The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

Frederick Law Olmsted


Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

Julia Morgan

Never turn down a job because you think it's too small; you don't know where it can lead.

Julia Morgan


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


Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

John Portman


It is through accomplishment that man makes his contribution and contribution is life's greatest reward.

John Portman


We must learn to understand humanity better so that we can create an environment that is more beneficial to people, more rewarding, more pleasant to experience.

John Portman


It is quite interesting that whilst there are tremendous theories, in the 1960s when IT was born, everybody was supposedly going to their cottage in the countryside to work in a virtual way.

Richard Rogers


My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.

Richard Rogers


The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

Richard Rogers



This is a pivotal time for urban regeneration. We must take a long term view.

Richard Rogers


A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe


God is in the details.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe


I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe


Less is more.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe



After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

Harry Seidler


Good design doesn't date.

Harry Seidler


The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal.

Harry Seidler


The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens.

Harry Seidler

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


A small house must depend on its grouping with other houses for its beauty, and for the preservation of light air and the maximum of surrounding open space.

Clarence Stein


The house itself is of minor importance. Its relation to the community is the thing that really counts.

Clarence Stein


Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.

Robert A. M. Stern


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


There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea.

Gustav Stickley


The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.

George Edmund Street


But the building's identity resided in the ornament.

Louis Sullivan


Form follows function.

Louis Sullivan


It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building.

Louis Sullivan


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


Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

Kenzo Tange


I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

Kenzo Tange


Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.

Kenzo Tange


Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

Yoshio Taniguchi


It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

Robert Venturi


Less is a bore.

Robert Venturi


Architecture aims at Eternity.

Christopher Wren


In things to be seen at once, much variety makes confusion, another vice of beauty. In things that are not seen at once, and have no respect one to another, great variety is commendable, provided this variety transgress not the rules of optics and geometry.

Christopher Wren


And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important.

Minoru Yamasaki


And I think that the environment is one very strong way to counterbalance the chaotic nature of our life.

Minoru Yamasaki


And sometimes I'm criticized. But I think that if those who criticize us will look at the reason why the shape is this, well then, I think that they would not object so strenuously.

Minoru Yamasaki


Because, if we understand how a building is to be produced and we find a way that it can be more simply produced, then obviously we are contributing to building better buildings more easily.

Minoru Yamasaki