Architect Quotes

For me, every day is a new thing.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

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

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man.

Copiers do not collaborate.

Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin.

Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.

The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.

The American order reveals a method that was largely the outcome of material necessity, as exemplified by the Colonial style and the grid.

Stonehenge was built possibly by the Minoans. It presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.

People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Like flats of today, terraces of houses gained a certain anonymity from identical facades following identical floor plans and heights.

It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process.

It is hardly surprising that the Georgian domestic style emerges as the most remarkable in the world.

In the Scottish Orkneys, the little stone houses with their single large room and central hearth had an extraordinary range of built-in furniture.

In the East there is a gap between the top of a wall and underside of a roof; it acts as a screen, and the Chinese were able to use it as they wished.

In the crowded and difficult conditions of a steep hillside, houses have had to struggle to establish their territory and to survive.

In Japanese houses the interior melts into the gardens of the outside world.

In Japanese art, space assumed a dominant role and its position was strengthened by Zen concepts.

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

Houses mean a creation, something new, a shelter freed from the idea of a cave.

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.