“The building's identity resided in the ornament.”

“Implicit in true freedom of spirit lies a proud and virile will. Such glorious power of free will to choose, envisages beneficent social responsibility as manifest and welcome.”

“In the history of mankind there are recorded two great Inversions. The first, set forth by the Nazarene to the effect that love is a greater power and more real than vengeance. The second proclaimed the earth to be a sphere revolving in its course around the sun. These affirmations were made in the face of all evidence sacred to the contrary.”

“The building's identity resided in the ornament.”

“Form follows function.”

“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.”

“There lies another power in man. That power is Moral: Its name is CHOICE! Within this one word, Choice, lies the story of man’s world. It stands for the secret poise within him. It reveals as a flashlight all his imagings, his phantasies, his willful thoughts, his deeds, from the greatest to the least, even in this gliding hour we call today. This one word, Choice, stands for the sole and single power; it is the name of the mystery that lies behind the veil of all human appearances. A word that dissolves the enigma of men’s deeds. A word, a light that not only illuminates all his obvious works, all the inner springs and motives of his civilizations, but a light whose rays reach within the sanctuary of the secret thought of each and all, thus revealing the man of the past and the man of today, starkly in personal status as a social factor of beneficence or wore. Need we know man’s thoughts? View his works, his deeds; they tell his choice.”

“The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? … To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.”