80 Inspiring Architecture Quotes

Architecture is more than just bricks and mortar; it's an art form that shapes our daily lives, influences our emotions, and reflects our cultures. Whether you're a student of architecture, a practicing professional, or simply an enthusiast, drawing inspiration from the words of visionary architects and designers can offer fresh perspectives and spark new ideas. In this post, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 80 inspiring architecture quotes. Each quote encapsulates the essence of creativity, innovation, and the profound impact that thoughtful design can have on our world. Dive in and let these powerful words fuel your passion for architecture.

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. “When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.” - Larry Wall

3. “When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context." - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994” - Jonathan Hale

4. “A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.” - Ezra Pound

5. “Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.” - Rebecca Solnit

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

7. “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

8. “Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.” - Kurt Vonnegut

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

10. “The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.” - Thomas Hardy

11. “History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.” - Thomas B. Costain

12. “The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.” - Christopher Wren

13. “A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.” - Ayn Rand

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

15. “Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.” - Robert A. Heinlein

16. “It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!” - André Breton

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

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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.” - Alain De Botton

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.” - Arthur Erickson

30. “After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.” - Arthur Erickson

31. “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

32. “We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)” - Tom McDonough

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” - Roland Barthes

36. “The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.” - Tom McDonough

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

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

39. “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

40. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Thelonious Monk

41. “Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.” - Maggie Macnab

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

43. “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

44. “(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ...project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion.” - Roy Landau

45. “For me, it does not 'miss' if (the Potteries Thinkbelt study) goes into the archive, not as an example of how railway carriages can be used for teaching, but as one of the most powerful question marks ever placed against the architecture of university education.” - Roy Landau

46. “Architecture is too slow in its realisation to be a 'problem solver'.” - Cedric Price

47. “C.P. Office sees its particular product (buildings) as the readily recognisable parts of its continuous design process.” - Cedric Price

48. “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

49. “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

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

51. “We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).” - Alain De Botton

52. “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

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

54. “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

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

56. “What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow.It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.'He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.''What?'He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said.'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.'Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.'That information is classified, I'm afraid.'1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.'Is it open to the public?' I said.'Not generally, no.'I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.'Are you happy here?' I said at last.He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said.'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.'He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.” - Donna Tartt

57. “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

58. “A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.” - Jon Ronson

59. “Architect without Pencil is like Rock-star without Guitar.” - Vinayak Hanchate

60. “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

61. “It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester]” - Owen Hatherley

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

63. “Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.” - Owen Hatherley

64. “Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the color of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction, and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall—in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.” - Alain De Botton

65. “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

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

67. “A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.” - Léon Krier

68. “The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.” - Léon Krier

69. “Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.” - Léon Krier

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

71. “Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.” - Léon Krier

72. “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

73. “Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.” - Stewart Brand

74. “Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.” - Judith Clancy

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

76. “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

77. “A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.” - Ayn Rand

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

79. “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

80. “It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening.” - Marina Fiorato