Architecture Masters' Dictums

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Philip Johnson

Architecture is the art of how to waste space

Philip Johnson

The city must be subject to growth, decay and renewal.

Kenzo Tange

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

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

Oscar Niemeyer

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses, The client made me do this. The city made me do this. Oh, the budget. I don't believe that anymore.

Frank Gehry

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Frank Gehry

Forms follows function.

Louis Sullivan

Form and function are one.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Form follows beauty.

Oscar Niemeyer

Forms accommodates function.

Robert Venturi

Function influence but does not dictate form.

Eero Saarinen

Less is bore.

Robert Venturi

Unity disguised as chaos - complexity and contradiction are often what make works of art both exciting and profound

Robert Venturi

I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.

Tadao Ando

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Tadao Ando

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

Renzo Piano

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

Jean Nouvel

I think architecture has to be a gift.

Jean Nouvel

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problem we split the possibilities to make good building art.

Alvar Aalto (Hugo Alvar Henric)

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfills a function is to be excluded from the domain of art

Adolf Loos

Ornament is a crime and all ornamentation must be rejected

Adolf Loos

Supply and demand regulate architecture form

Adolf Loos

Form does not necessarily follow function.

Antonio Gaudi

Truth is indispensible to Architecture & architectural lie concepts.

Auguste Perret

A building is the combination of different geometric figures.

Benjamin H. Latrobe

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Buckminster Fuller

Drawing architecture is a schizoid act: it involves reducing the world into a piece of paper.

Eduardo Souto De Moura

I have come to the conviction that once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message.

Eero Saarinen

Architectural-form equals social-form

Eliel Saarinen

Beauty grows from necessity not from repetition of formulas.

Eliel Saarinen

Architecture seizes upon space, encompasses space and is space itself.

Erich Mendelsohn

Architecture depends on the sensuous seizure by means of touch and sight.

Erich Mendelsohn

Make big plans; aim high in hope and hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

Daniel Burnham

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens blood.

Daniel Burnham

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

Architecture is Organic.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the day of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Think simples as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

Frank Lloyd Wright

An idea is salvation by imagination.

Frank Lloyd Wright

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

John Ruskin

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

John Ruskin

The house is a machine for living in.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

Architecture or Revolution

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

the exterior of the building is the result of the interior.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth

Louis Kahn

Every time a student walks past and 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 house is a house.

Louis Kahn

Less is more.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

God is in the details.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

It is better to be good than to be original.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Less is more, almost

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

I am neither a capitalist nor a socialist, I am not a religious or an atheist.

Lucio Costa

Each one sees whatever he wishes to see

Lucio Costa

Architecture is a social art."

Marcel Lajos Breuer

Architecture must meet 3 requirements: Strength, Beauty, and Utilities

Marcus Vitruvius Polio

Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.

Marcus Vitruvius Polio

the reality of a building is not the container but the space within

Frank Lloyd Wright

the architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes responsibility"

Frank Lloyd Wright

nature spelled with a capital N the way you spell God with a capital G"

Frank Lloyd Wright

organic architecture: all parts are related to the whole as the whole was related to the parts; continuity and integrity"

Frank Lloyd Wright

architecture is a synthesis of the technology and art

Pierre Luigi Nervi

Structural correctness, which is identical with functional, technical & economic is a necessary & sufficient condition of satisfactory aesthetic result.

Pierre Luigi Nervi

Architecture must have liberty of forms

Oscar Niemeyer

In my opinion, architecture is invention. And under this prism is how I do my projects, always searching for beautiful, expressive, different and surprising solutions

Oscar Niemeyer

modern architecture need not be western

Kenzo Tange

symbolisms and blasphemies

Ieoh Ming Pei

architecture is the expression of the past

Ieoh Ming Pei

design is how, form is what

Richard Rogers

nothing that is not practical can be beautiful

Otto Wagner

essential basis of natural forms as geometries

Otto Wagner

The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace... a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.

Minoru Yamasaki

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

Minoru Yamasaki

Design as if you are a child.

Michael Graves

Classical forms language of both the arctuated and trabeated models.

Michael Graves

ornament equals crime

Adolf Loos

lift the building in the ground

Adolf Loos

modern ideas in modern dress

Charles Renee Mackintosh

design by living men for living men

Charles Renee Mackintosh

mushroom slab construction

Robert Mailart

A bridge is like a house

Robert Maillart

fluid mass theory

Erich Mendelsohn

Architecture is the only tangible expression of space, of which the human mind is capable

Erich Mendelsohn

spiritual function is inseparable from practical function

Eero Saarinen

beauty grows from necessity, not from repetition

Eleil Saarinen

a house is like a flower pot

Richard Nuetra

most important material is man

Richard Nuetra

the client is chaos

Rem Koolhaas

the integration of notion of cheapness to create sublime conditions

Rem Koolhaas

a town in a town

Otto Wagner

form is the mystery that defies description but brings people pleasure

Alvar Aalto (Hugo Alvar Henric)

a cube within a cube

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

space and light and order. These are the things men need just as much they need bread or place to sleep

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

the styles are a lie

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

straight lines belong to man, curved lines belong to God

Antonio Gaudi

nature and architecture are two different things

Marcel Bruer

art and architecture, the new unity

Walter Gropius

machine is to be our modern medium of design

Walter Gropius