“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
“Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.”
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who do not see.”
“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen”
“The greater danger for most of us lies not
in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
“Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art”
“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.”
“Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.”
“To express is to drive. And there is where Design comes in. And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”
And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you. What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“… I like an Arch””
“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.”
“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”
“Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”
“A Work of Art
… is not a living thing …
that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of Man’s Fingers. To some it is the wonder of the Mind. To some it is the wonder of Technique. And to some it is how Real it is. To some, how Transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony
it presents itself with a feeling
that you know it, if you have heard it once. And you look for it,
and though you know it you must hear it again. Though you know it you must see it again. Truly a work of Art is one that tells us,
that Nature cannot make what man can make.”
“Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.”
“An expert is a man who has stopped thinking-he knows!”
“Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.”
“A free American means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.”
“A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.”
“A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the ago of 50, and a fool if he doesn’t afterward.”
“Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism… but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.”
“Mechanization best serves mediocrity.”
“Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.”
“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.”
“No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.”
“Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”
“Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders’ spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to everyone and married to the ground.”
“Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.”
“Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.”
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”
“Space is the breath of art.”
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
“The architect must be a prophet… a prophet in the true sense of the term… if he can’t see at least ten years ahead, don’t call him an architect.”
“The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.”
“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.”
“The mother art is architecture. Without architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines – so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.”
“The room within is the great fact about the building.”
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head fill citified ears -as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his hear. He is sidewalk happy.”
“The space within becomes the reality of the building.”
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
“‘Think simple’ as my old master used to say – meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest of terms, getting back to first principles.”
“Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.”
“True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building or a park.”
“We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.”
“Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.”
“All fine architectural vales are human values, else not valuable.”
“An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.”
“Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.”
“Buildings, too, are children of the Earth and Sun.”
“Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”
“Freedom is from within.”
“Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.”
“I feel a strange disease coming on – humility.”
“I think Ms. Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.”
“Less is only more where more is no good.”
“Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.”
“Form follows function- that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”
“Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.”
“If you foolishly ignore beauty, you’ll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”
“An idea is salvation by imagination.”
“TV is chewing gum for the eyes.”
“Tip the world over on its side and everything will land in Los Angeles.”
“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
“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.”
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
“I hope that America as a whole, and especially its architects, will become more seriously involved in producing a new architectural culture that would bring the nation to the apex – where it has stood before – and lead the world.”
“A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature. “
“Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers – the rich.”
“I’m not an architectural composer.”
“Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families.”
“I am but an architectural composer.”
“Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.”
“The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.”
“It fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.”
“Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.”
“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.”
“Supply and demand regulate architectural form.”
“I look upon myself as a musical bricklayer with architectural aspirations.”
“It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.”
“If we are going to get the public and the specialists and politicians to come together, then the creation of Architectural Centres is vital.”
“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.”
“Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.”
“All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”
“You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch is his throne.”
“Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.”
