I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.


In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.


In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, high-tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit — if totally different in form — from all the romantic architecture of the past.


It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.


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.


Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.


No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.


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.


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.


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.


The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.


The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.


The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.


The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.


The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.


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.


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!


When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.


When we build, let us think that we build for ever.


You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

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