We are surrounded by the designs and dreams of the architects who built the structures we live, work, and play in. Here are some inspiring quotes about architecture.
- “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry
- “A design isn’t finished until someone is using it.” – Brenda Laurel
- “We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.” – Ludwig Miles van der Rohe
- “Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
- “I call architecture frozen music.” – Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
- “Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.” – Tim Parsey
- “Any architectural work that does not express serenity is an error.” – Luis Barragán.
- “To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it.” – Daniel Libeskind
- “Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.” – Frank Stella
- “There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don’t care how a building looks if it means something, not to the architects, but to the people who use it.” – David Chipperfield.
- “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” – Juhani Pallasmaa
- “What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.” – Ada Louise Huxtable
- “Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” – Contantin Brancusi
- “Good architecture is like a good therapy session, a good marriage, a good poem – gently and almost invisibly allowing you to be you, as flawed and as beautiful as you are.” – Robert Sullivan
- “There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.” – Antonio Gaudi
- “Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” – Yoshio Taniguchi
- “Architects can’t force people to connect, it can only plan crossing points, remove barriers and make the meeting places useful and attractive.” – Denise Scott
- “We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.” – Glenn Murcutt
- “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.” – Alain de Botton
