Quotes on Architecture

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

The spirituality of the music is something that I always search for in what I do, because I think that music has to have everything inside: a strong architecture, a support, the emotion.

Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.

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

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

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 fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

A good sketch is better than a long speech.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Architecture is an expression of values.

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body.

The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Architects cannot teach nature anything.

Greek architecture is the flowering of geometry.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.

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.