Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.
—Luis Barragan (1902–88) Mexican Engineer, Architect
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, See! this our fathers did for us.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Houses are built to live in, more than to look on; therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English Philosopher
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The architecture of a nation is great only when it is as universal and established as its language, and when provinncial differences are nothing more than so many dialects.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
—Colleen Barrett (b.1944) American Businessperson
In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of form.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
Architecture is the work of nations.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) Italian-born French Poet, Playwright
If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones, and others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) German-born American Architect, Academic
Of all the forms of visible otherworldliness, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably worthless.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) German-born American Architect, Academic
Any work of architecture that does not express serenity is a mistake.
—Luis Barragan (1902–88) Mexican Engineer, Architect
The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
—Salvador Dali (1904–89) Spanish Painter
Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
—Louis Kahn (1901–74) American Architect
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) German-born American Architect, Academic
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–38) American Novelist
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic
A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965) British Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Journalist, Author
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines—so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain
—John Adams (1735–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell.
—John Milton (1608–74) English Poet, Civil Servant, Scholar, Debater
I call architecture petrified music. Really there is something in this: The tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
—Thomas Fuller (1608–61) English Cleric, Historian
Greek architecture is the flowering of geometry.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Architecture is frozen music.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
—Joyce Cary (1888–1957) English Novelist, Artist
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 (1867–1959) American Architect
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—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971) French Fashion Designer
Don’t fight forces, use them.
—Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American Inventor, Philosopher
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
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.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher