A COLLECTION OF QUOTATIONS

This is just a personal collection of what others have said about architecture. Profound, cynical or silly, it is relevant to me; perhaps it will be for you as well. It is in no particular order and I add to it from time to time.

Architecture: the art of building in which human requirements and construction materials are related so as to furnish practical use as well as an aesthetic solution, thus differing from the pure utility of engineering construction.
- The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
- Le Corbusier

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.
- Philip Johnson

Architecture is frozen music
- Frederic von Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst

Architecture begins where engineering ends.
- Walter Gropius

Architecture is a strong art, but a weak profession
- Robert Gutman

[Architecture is] a social act [and] the material theater of human activity.
- Spiro Kostof

Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity—the habit of saying “good morning” to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
– Roger Scruton

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You can’t work in the abstract.
– I.M. Pei

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 starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins … Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
– Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.
– Philip Johnson

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
- Walt Whitman

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
- Le Corbusier

A great building … must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
– Louis Kahn

To me, the drawn language is a very revealing language; one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.
– Eero Saarinen

The profession of architecture has been hitherto in the hands of two sets of men. The first of those [gentlemen] who from traveling or from books have acquired some knowledge of the theory of the art, know nothing of its practice, the second of those [mechanics] who know nothing but the practice, and whose early life being spent on labor, … have had no opportunity to acquire the theory. The complaisance of these two sets of men to each other, renders it difficult for the architect to get in between them, for the building mechanic finds his account in the ignorance of the gentleman-architect, as the latter does in the submissive deportment which interest dictates to the former.
- Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Letter of July 12, 1806 to Robert Mills.

Amid the blaze of light which in this nineteenth century has so illumined the world, architecture alone lies motionless, covered with the dust of ages. Not a single new idea, so far as I know, has been suggested by the profession within the memory of man.”
– Henry Rutton, Canadian Engineer

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
- Ambrose Bierce

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.
- Yoshio Taniguchi