Architecture quotes

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.

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.

Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Form follows function.

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things that's all.

Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.