Quotes on Modern Architecture

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

But the building's identity resided in the ornament.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

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.

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

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.