Architecture Quotes

“Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.”

“Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.”

“Modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.”

“Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.”

“Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture.”

“If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.”

“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”

“Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.”

“For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)”

“My architecture is the architecture of survival.”

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative.”