59 Inspiring Architecture Quotes

Architecture embodies the sublime intersection of art and engineering, crafting spaces that resonate with beauty, functionality, and innovation. Whether it's a towering skyscraper that reshapes city skylines or a humble home that envelops families in comfort, architecture speaks to the heart of human creativity and purpose. In this article, we delve into a curated collection of inspiring architecture quotes that capture the essence of visionary design and the transformative power of constructed spaces. These quotes will not only ignite your passion for architecture but also offer profound insights into the minds of those who shape our built environment. Join us as we explore these timeless words of wisdom that celebrate the discipline of architecture in all its grandeur and diversity.

1. “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

2. “A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.” - Frederick Phillips Brooks

3. “Light must always win.” - Maurice Smith

4. “The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized.” - Mark Wigley

5. “The cosmetic is cosmic.” - Rem Koolhaas

6. “I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.” - Noel Coward

7. “...In Jack Nasar's research on American's taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects.” - Winifred Gallagher

8. “Less is more!” - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

9. “Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.” - Rebecca Solnit

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

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

12. “Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude” - Jane Jacobs

13. “An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.” - Rebecca Solnit

14. “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.” - Alain De Botton

15. “Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long?Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugly.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

16. “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.” - Alain De Botton

17. “Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.” - Ada Louise Huxtable

18. “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

19. “But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!The ruler struck the glass over the picture.- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?” - Ayn Rand

20. “The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.” - Lew Wallace

21. “We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as moments of life 'concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a play of events' -- but that also necessary entailed the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art, the abolition of politics, and the fall of the 'spectacle-commodity economy.” - Tom McDonough

22. “For a brief period of time the American electric-sign industry looked beyond its most immediate market and collaborated with store designers and architects in creating a style which became known as 'stream-line.' Later it became known as 'American Déco.' Whatever it was called or will be called in the future, it represents in terms of neon a thrust away from isolated signage toward an area of architectural ornamentation in which signage is but one element in an overall plan. — Rudi Stern” - Philip Di Lemme

23. “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

24. “Literature is painting, architecture, and music.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

25. “Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.” - Aldous Huxley

26. “I call architecture frozen music.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

27. “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

28. “Function First” - Michael E. Pipkins

29. “...architects (should) involve themselves continuously in anticipatory design as recommended by Buckminster Fuller” - Cedric Price

30. “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

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

32. “A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

33. “It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

34. “Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

35. “There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

36. “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

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

38. “I am opposed to Naperville. It's all cute, trendy and expensive, and filled with cookie-cutter Borg houses that assimilate you into upper-middle-class America.” - Robyn Bachar

39. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston S. Churchill

40. “Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn’s museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: “Our stuff looks tinny compared to it.” At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society’s most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever.” - Martin Filler

41. “Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.” - Nick Flynn

42. “Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales, from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster...” - Penelope Lively

43. “For example, they recently had a piece on a character--I think his name was Ambrosio D'Urbervilles--whose "design statement" was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it "Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath.” - Mark Helprin

44. “With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh.” - Masato Otaka

45. “Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.” - Le Corbusier

46. “A building is not a sentence, which in principle has the ability to match and express a thought closely. It is not linear, like language. Compared to the fluidity of words, a building is atrociously clumsy, but it can be lived and inhabited as books cannot be.” - Rowan Moore

47. “Nomadom je postao onda kada je o omjeru ljepote počeo razmišljati kao o ljubavnom odnosu između dvaju dijelova u kojem se suprotnosti privlače upravo magičnom snagom, a isti omjer jednako gospodari i arhitekturom i prirodom.” - Jasna Horvat

48. “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” - Juhani Pallasmaa

49. “He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.” - Bruce Robinson

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

51. “Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.” - Léon Krier

52. “I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197” - Daniel Libeskind

53. “Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.” - Alain De Botton

54. “In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

55. “Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.” - G.K. Chesterton

56. “Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.” - Jeanne Gang

57. “I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.” - Mies Van de Rohe

58. “If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.” - Evelyn Waugh

59. “He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn’t be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.” - Annie Dillard