Great Quotes By Architects

I don’t think using quotes as a source of inspiration is unique to me, but I do think that the quotes I’m inspired by reveal something about me. When I am searching for inspiration or need motivation I’ll look at images from or read the words of designers I respect the most and this usually gets my wheels turning. I’m only including quotes by architects, but there are many other sources for equally inspiring words. Many of the quotes listed here are ones I have been contemplating for years, trying to understand the true meaning of the words. Some are newer to me, but equally interesting and worth contemplation.

“I like to think of myself as being concerned with a higher order of things and probably the clearest manifestation we have of some higher order in the universe is what we see in nature and what we feel in nature.”   E. Fay Jones

“The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time— is he who shall create poems in stone.”  Louis Sullivan

 “To vitalize building materials, to animate them with a thought…to charge them with a social significance and value…to impart to them the best that is in the people–such is the real function of the architect.”  Louis Sullivan

“Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.”   Thomas Fuller

 “With a few fateful lines on his drawing board, the architect decrees the boundaries of imagination, the peace of mind, the human stature of generations to come.”   Hassan Fathy

“My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we – architects – can effect the quality of life of the people..”   Richard Rogers

“Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”   Louis Kahn

“Building art is a synthesis of life in materialized form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.”   Alvar Aalto

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”   R. Buckminster Fuller

Always design a thing by considering it in it’s next larger context a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.   Eero Saarinen

” The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man’s life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence.”   Eero Saarinen

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”   Frank Gehry

 “It’s not about your greatness as an architect, but your compassion”   Sambo Mockbee

“Architecture, more than any other art form, is a social art and must rest on the social and cultural base of its time and place.”   Sambo Mockbee

“We must use the opportunity to survey our own backyards either to see what makes them special, individual and beautiful”   Sambo Mockbee

“The best way to make real architecture is by letting a building evolve out of a place and culture.” Sambo Mockbee

“Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built.”  Frank Lloyd Wright

“No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other. ”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.”   Frank Lloyd Wright

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

“An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.”  Frank Lloyd Wright

“Less is only more where more is no good.”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“An expert is a man who has stopped thinking – he knows!”   Frank Lloyd Wright

“I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface. And among the first habits that a young architect should learn, is that of thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its miserable liny skeleton; but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn lights it and the dusk leaves it…..”  John Ruskin

“Architecture, besides fulfilling a function, sends a message to the onlooker through its varied and significant forms. No passerby confuses a church with a jail. It is perhaps not so obvious that structure to has a message of its own: it can be a message of strength or elegance, of waste or economy, of ugliness or beauty.”   Mario Salvadori