112 Architecture Quotes for Creative Inspiration

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Architecture is the art or practice of designing and building structures and especially habitable ones. The below Architecture Quotes will help you to awaken the best creative art from your inside and to know the greatness of this art. Apart from these architecture quotes, you can also read other motivational quotes on art, attraction, arrogance, and positive good vibes.

Here is the collection of best inspirational architecture quotes to awaken the great architect in you.

1. “Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.” ― Julia Morgan

2. “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” ― Philip Johnson

3. “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” ― Le Corbusier

4. “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” ― Frank Gehry

5. “Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.” ― John Portman

6. “Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.” ― Stephen Gardiner

7. “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.” ― David Allan Coe

8. “The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.” ― Thomas a Kempis

9. “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own civilization.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright

10. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

11. “Whatever good things we build end up building us.” ― Jim Rohn

12. “A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.” ― Guillaume Apollinaire

13. “Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.” ― Toyo Ito

14. “Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.” ― Bryant H. McGill

15. “Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” ― Constantin Brancusi

16. “Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.” ― Harry Seidler

17. “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.” ― Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

18. “I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.” ― Tadao Ando

19. “I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.” ― Ayn Rand

20. “I don’t divide architecture, landscape, and gardening; to me, they are one.” ― Luis Barragan

21. “I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.” ― Maya Lin

22. “To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.” ― Daniel Libeskind

23. “We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they are graceful and pleasing in doing it.” ― John Ruskin

24. “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.” ― Philip Johnson

25. “Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task, therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.” ― Adolf Loos

26. “Architecture begins where engineering ends.” ― Walter Gropius

27. “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

28. “Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” ― Yoshio Taniguchi

29. “Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.” ― Bruce Jackson

30. “Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.” ― Helmut Jahn

31. “Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright

32. “Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.” ― Arthur Erickson

33. “Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings.” ― Vitruvius

34. “The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams.” ― Robert A. M. Stern

35. “The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.” ― Saul Steinberg

36. “A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.” ― Ayn Rand

37. “Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.” ― John Portman

38. “Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.” ― Kenzo Tange

39. “Architecture is invention.” ― Oscar Niemeyer

40. “Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.” ― Arne Jacobsen

41. “Building art is a synthesis of life in materialized form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.” ― Alvar Aalto

42. “I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people.” ― Donna Karan

43. “No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.” ― John Ruskin

44. “Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely places for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another.” ― Sally A. Kitt Chappell

45. “The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.” ― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

46. “The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.” ― Adolf Loos

47. “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright

48. “A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” ― Louis Kahn

49. “A house can have integrity, just like a person,’ said Roark, ‘and just as seldom.” ― Ayn Rand

50. “A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.” ― Ezra Pound

51. “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” ― Robertson Davies

52. “Forests were the first temples of God and in forests, men grasped their first idea of architecture.” ― James C. Snyder

53. “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” ― Juhani Pallasmaa

54. “The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.” ― Victor Hugo

55. “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” ― Michelangelo

56. “The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar, and marble.” ― Christopher Wren

57. “They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar” ― Henry David Thoreau

58. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” ― Winston S Churchill

59. “A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement of the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.” ― Cedric Price

60. “Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.” ― Louis Kahn

61. “Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.” ― Spiro Kostof

62. “Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.” ― Louis Kahn

63. “Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.” ― Cedric Price

64. “Architecture should have little to do with problem-solving – rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible.” ― Cedric Price

65. “It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today’s blind architecture – a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!” ― André Breton

66. “It is a new design by architects versus world revolution by the political leadership.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

67. “On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.” ― Ross Macdonald

68. “Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air, and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.” ― Kevin McCloud

69. “The only direction not represented in their construction was vertical.” ― Lee Battersby

70. “A tree becomes a tower, a tower regrows a tree.” ― Neri Oxman

71. “Architects are now on the look for materials and substances that can enhance biodiversity and rewild living systems.” ― Neri Oxman

72. “Architecture is too slow in its realisation to be a ‘problem solver’.” ― Cedric Price

73. “If we can scale the structure and function relationships found in trees and crustaceans – we will be able to architect buildings, including full scale towers, as living structures able to adapt and respond to their environment.” ― Neri Oxman

74. “Imagine that nature is the single most important client in the architectural practice.” ― Neri Oxman

75. “It’s about enabling the generation of materials and structures designed to interact, adapt and respond to the natural environment.” ― Neri Oxman

76. “Let’s architect a future of synergy between the natural and the built environment.” ― Neri Oxman

77. “Melanin represents unity in the diversity of life on earth.” ― Neri Oxman

78. “Through life and programmed decomposition – shelter becomes an organism, and the organism becomes a shelter.” ― Neri Oxman

79. “To speak in nature’s language, we must prioritize bio-based structural materials; biopolymers. Biopolymers are natural polymers produced by the cells of living organisms.” ― Neri Oxman

80. “To speak in nature’s language, we must prioritize bio-based structural materials; biopolymers.” ― Neri Oxman

81. “Unlike blowing or forming glass, resulting in smooth and continuous surfaces; the printing of glass enables high levels of control over shape and optical properties.” ― Neri Oxman

82. “We must consider the building not as an object but as a collaborative system tightly linked to it’s natural environment.” ― Neri Oxman

83. “A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.” ― Ayn Rand

84. “An architect can build for the future.” ― Anthony T. Hincks

85. “Architecture should reflect the past and the present with the future in mind.” ― Anthony T. Hincks

86. “Architecture strives to be the perfect embodiment of an idea as free as possible from all flaws or defects. It requires a process of methodical and relentless refinement.” ― Robert Steinberg

87. “Environment and development must go hand in hand, one cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the other.” ― Abhijit Naskar

88. “Let us find harmony between concrete and nature. Without harming earth, let us build green skyscrapers.” ― Abhijit Naskar

89. “Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.” ― Socrates

90. “Sometimes we see a house built with such magnificent architecture that ‘Here, a real architect!’ we shout enthusiastically!” ― Mehmet Murat ildan

91. “When you make changes to preserve something, whether an artifact or an entire building, you risk altering the object and it’s history. However, if you don’t, you risk losing it entirely.” ― Mackenzie Finklea

92. “Architect without Pencil is like Rock-star without Guitar.” ― Vinayak Hanchate

93. “Architecture is shaped by human emotions and desires, and then becomes a setting for further emotions and desires. It goes from the animate and inanimate and back again. For this reason it is always incomplete, or rather is only completed by the lives in and around it. It is background.” ― Rowan Moore

94. “Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.” ― Stewart Brand

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

96. “Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.” ― Leon Krier

97. “Design has killed architecture. Design is what they teach in the schools.” ― Le Corbusier

98. “Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.” ― Norman Foster

99. “Good ideas come from everywhere. It’s more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.” ― Jeanne Gang

100. “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.” ― Mies Van de Rohe

101. “The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.” ― Hugh Ferriss

102. “All buildings have a psychological as well as a purely visual effect on the landscape.” ― Elisabeth Beazley

103. “Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.” ― Bill Hillier

104. “Architecture cannot change the economic machinations of globalization.” ― Graham Owen

105. “Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.” ― Alain de Botton

106. “Architecture led to the vanishing point which led to architecture.” ― Robin Evans

107. “In a creative activity such as architecture, metaphor is less a threat to objective truth and more (to use another architectural metaphor) an arena of conceptual vitality – an arena being a performance area shareable with others.” ― Simon Unwin

108. “Literature and architecture experience the world in the same way, but arrive at different decisions, and look in different directions.” ― Christoph Grafe

109. “The metaphors of architecture are protean ghosts haunting a many roomed labyrinth. They morph and fuse, subtly mutating perceptions; like distorting glass. When you look more closely you realise that the labyrinth of architectural ideology is ruled by those protean ghosts.” ― Simon Unwin

110. “There is no truth in architecture, only proposition and a yearning for sense.” ― Simon Unwin

111. “Viewed from this perspective, architecture no longer provides a happy ending, but instead allows stories to continue.” ― Christoph Grafe

112. “We might think of metaphor as a device belonging to the poetry of words but metaphor can also be non-verbal – visual, spatial, experiential… Metaphor is essential to the poetry of architecture too.” ― Simon Unwin

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