Architects Quotes

Quotes: What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state - Aldo Rossi – A knowledge of the city enables us not only to understand architecture, but also, as architects, to design it - Aldo Rossi – One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city - Aldo Rossi – An architectural project is a vocation or a love affair; in either case, it is a construction. One can hold oneself back in the face of this vocation or affair, but it will always remain an unresolved thing. - Aldo Rossi – Architecture is art or it is not architecture - Alvaro Siza – There are simply no shortcuts one can take in the process of finding solutions for architectural problems - Alvaro Siza – Architecture should not be a personal gesture. It belongs to the city. But it needs an artistic investment - Christian de Portzamparc – How wiggly can you get and still make a building? - Frank O Gehry – The fish solidified my understanding of how to make architecture move - Frank O Gehry – The most important thing to me is to build the buildings - Frank O Gehry – In the end my work is my work; it´s not a critic´s work - Frank O Gehry – It is the responsibility of the architect to leave behind buildings that are assets to culture. - Fumihiko Maki – I have no message to tell everybody beyond saying we´ve got responsibilities to do things properly. That´s the least we can do as architects.

- Glenn Murcutt – I am interested in the shape of the building only as a consequence of the issues about the responsibility toward materials, process of production, the ability to recycle, light, ventilation, the relationship to the outside and the natural landscape - Glenn Murcutt – I like my architecture to speak for me. - Gordon Bunshaft – I´m old. and I can reminisce for the next ten years. - Gordon Bunshaft – I´ve had ladies write me about the Beinecke saying that they just shivered when they saw it - Gordon Bunshaft – Anyone who does not have the strength to sin will not necessarily be a saint or a good architect – more likely a bore - Gottfried Bohm We work without bright colors or decoration because in our opinion it is in fact this untouched “natural” state of these common materials, their “purity,” so to speak, which gives the buildings an extraordinary effects - Herzog and De Meuron The particular way in which functional-symbolic elements are put together may be the “art” in architecture - James Stirling – It is his unique responsibility to raise the human spirit by the quality of the environment which he creates, whether in a room, a building or a town. - James Stirling – I have the building in my head like a composer has his symphony - Jorn Utzon – First and last, you have a relationship with the people who are to use the building - Jorn Utzon – A lot of Discussion and work is required to make a simple project - Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa – One of our interests is how to create atmosphere, a landscape for people - Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa –

The role of an architect is service. You are a servant of the community. You are, in a way, “a handyman.” - Kevin Roche – Solitude is good company, and my architecture is not for those who fear it or shun it - Luis Barragan – The wall is an “architectural striptease” - Luis Barragan – My architecture is biographical - Luis Barragan – Two issues that I believe are particularly important in the future growth of cities: the role of public spaces and the quest for more ecologically responsible architecture - Norman Foster – Many of my buildings have been political and civic monuments but perhaps some of them have given ordinary people – powerless people – a sense of delight - Oscar Niemeyer – Mountains/waves/women = curves - Oscar Niemeyer – You will know that the house is successful if you get up one morning and find yourself dancing barefoot through it - Paulo Mendes Da Rocha – Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere - Peter Zumthor – Material is endless, take a stone: you can saw it; grind it; drill into it; split it; or polish it, it will become a different thing each time - Peter Zumthor – Mass, large and serene, should be left alone so that the presence of the stone is felt, so that it can exert its own effect on our bodies - Peter Zumthor – about the Thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland Architecture is art, nothing else - Philip Johnson – I don´t think ideology has anything to do with architecture… You see, I have no convictions, but do have taste - Philip Johnson –

Architecture is a terribly foolish profession to go into. I think most students know that. At least I always tell them. - Philip Johnson – The intended material of the building must be present at its conception - Rafael Moneo – The good thing about my work is that it can be explained. And probably that offers to others the hope that knowledge can be a way into architecture. - Rafael Moneo – I prefer to think that architecture is the air we breathe when buildings have arrived at their radical solitude - Rafael Moneo – In my own mind, I am as much a writer as an architect - Rem Koolhaas – Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity… the voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal – if only – modes by which we experience the city. - Rem Koolhaas – I am fascinated by the world of light and shadow that exists free of associations with specific colors or materials - Richard Meier – The getty is not a white building - Richard Meier – Our aim must be to achieve a new and dynamic equilibrium between society, cities, and nature - Richard Rogers – Neither architects nor anyone who is concerned about the future can ignore the effects of climate change nor the widening gulf between rich and poor - Richard Rogers – I write as an architect who employs criticism rather than a critic who chooses architecture - Robert Venturi – As we had learned from the spaces of Rome, we learned from the symbolism of Las Vegas - Robert Venturi –

Structure is my mode of expression, a language, it is like a poet who must weed out excesses to reveal the essence - Sverre Fehn – I find it very mysterious, my architecture. It is filled with death and mysticism – the archetypes of light and darkness - Sverre Fehn – It seems to me that, at present, concrete is the most suitable material for realizing spaces created by rays of sunlight - Tadao Ando – I am interested in the ambiguous space which exists between inside and outside - Tadao Ando – The wall is the most basic tool of architecture - Tadao Ando – Virtual territory – that is, the territory of the mind of the student - Thom Mayne – If I was a man, they wouldn´t call me a diva - Zaha Hadid –

Books: Space in Japanese architecture, - Mitsuo Inoue, translated by Hiroshi Watanabe, NY – Weatherhill – Tokyo 1st edition 1985 

In the introduction to his book, An Outline of European Architecture, Nikolaus Pevsner writes: “ What distinguishes architecture from painting and sculpture is its spatial quality. In this, and only in this, no other artist can emulate the architect. Thus the history of architecture is primarily a history of man shaping space, and the historian must keep spatial problems always in the foreground.” -Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 6th, Jubilee ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 7.