Architect Quotes

Great artists need great clients. ~ I.M. Pei

My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don't think that they actually got to know one another deeply. ~ Christopher Durang

May the Architect be high-minded;
not arrogant, but faithful;
Just, and easy to deal with,
without avarice;
Not let his mind be occupied
in receiving gifts,
But let him preserve his good name
with dignity... ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Don't worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don't have to be a botanist; you don't have to be a bulldozer driver; you don't have to be a fence builder; you don't have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships. ~ Bill Mollison

We are the true architects of our lives. Only we as individuals and individuals alone, carry within us, the inner ability to make any changes to it's blue prints. ~ Robert M. Hensel

From when I was about seven, I thought I wanted to be an architect. I've always loved spaces and dwellings in general. ~ Arizona Muse

I'll sue!" Ian sputtered. "I'll sue you AND the dog. And the country of South Korea. And ... and ... " "The landscape architect?" Natalie asked. "The landscape architect!" Ian shouted. ~ Peter Lerangis

If you must then hire for passion first, experience second and credentials third. Then train those hired for directed passion, dropping the excess baggage and the whole process of unlearning. An entrepreneur is much like an architect shapping human resources into a well crafted power house. ~ Nikhil Sharda

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan - the architect of Israel's astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War - also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Architecture is a subtle and difficult art. It needs dedication and involves pain. Being able 'to architect' is not a capacity that can be developed to sophisticated levels quickly and easily. ~ Simon Unwin

The day I went to see my father to say I wanted to become an architect, he was a bit surprised, because for him being a builder is much more than being just an architect. He was very angry, and I never thought I could do something else. ~ Renzo Piano

If we want sincere harmony, peace and joy in our lives, we can have them, but we must be willing to do the work. We must make maintaining an awareness of our spiritual natures first in our lives. Our inner world is the architect of our external world. We don't lose faith in the goodness of life because we become angry and depressed. We become angry and depressed because we lose faith in the goodness of life. ~ Susan L. Taylor

One man who could understand it very well was the architect of these stop-gap measures: General the Viscount Gort, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. A big burly man of 53, Lord Gort was no strategist - he was happy to follow the French lead on such matters - but he had certain soldierly virtues that came in handy at a time like this. He was a great fighter - had won the Victoria Cross storming the Hindenburg Line in 1918 - and he was completely unflappable. ~ Walter Lord

Inconsistency itself breeds vitality. ~ Kenzo Tange

Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman. ~ Catherine Hardwicke

Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design? ~ Jan Morris

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own. ~ Michel De Montaigne

My affection for CinemaScope initially was my affection for the horizontal line as I learned it from having been apprenticed to an architect who was someone named Frank Lloyd Wright. ~ Nicholas Ray

The room within is the great fact about the building. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The architect's role is to fight for a better world, where he can produce an architecture that serves everyone and not just a group of privileged people. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

I do not think that when in a hotel you have to feel "at home", on the contrary, you have to get the feeling that you are definitely elsewhere… ~ Aurelio Vazquez Duran

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I love movies and I love art - and an architect is an entertainer, the guy who builds a rollercoaster is an entertainer. He knows where to build the slopes, and the big anticipation when you go up ... He makes you go, 'Oh my God!' when you get to the top before you come down. It's just the same as structuring a show or a dance. ~ Michael Jackson

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family") ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Question everything generally thought to be obvious. ~ Dieter Rams

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. ~ Arne Jacobsen

Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid. ~ Arthur Koestler

So I was shampooing at 14. But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it. ~ Vidal Sassoon

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. ~ James Gleick

An architect must remember that the people working or living in his building need space - to dream, to be quiet, to find beauty somewhere. ~ Christian De Portzamparc

Purses are dreamt up by artists, not architects. ~ Lauren Conrad

Of course, I didn't become an architect, but later on in Iran, I had a lot of contact and discussions with architects because Iran was developing, and I felt we shouldn't destroy the past and copy completely the West, which is the problem in developing countries. ~ Farah Diba

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower. ~ Norman Foster

Yet another video has emerged of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber calling Americans 'stupid,' and bragging about how the Affordable Care Act's drafters had to deceive the public in order to pass the law. ~ Alexander Viets Griswold

… a move from the idea of an architect as expert problem-solver to that of architect as citizen sense-maker; a move for a reliance on the impulsive imagination of the long genius to that of collaborative ethical imagination, from clinging towards notion of total control a relaxed acceptance of letting go. ~ Jeremy Till

You are the architect of your own loneliness. ~ Adam Shankman

How much does your building weigh?
A question often used to challenge architects to consider how efficiently materials were used for the space enclosed. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Don't let your mood or happiness be dictated by the judgement of others but stay true to that you believe in because you're the architect of your own happiness. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

Each man the architect of his own fate. ~ Sallust

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

Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. he will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well. ~ Dale Chihuly

When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road. ~ Ove Arup

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. Now you have the nerve to criticize the 'architect' America just hired - President Obama - to rebuild from the ashes. ~ Frank Schaeffer

A large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design houses for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants. ~ Prince Charles

Consider the situation: Money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. ~ Tim Harford

It's hard to let go of control, to stop trying to be the architect of not only our own lives but the lives of the people around us as we single-mindedly work towards our own flawed constructions of "perfection." Once we do, though, we might actually be able to recognize the beauty we've missed. ~ Alicia Elliott

For many years Minos has been lucky to have in his court the most gifted inventor, the most skilled artificer outside of the Olympian forges of Hephaestus. His name is Daedalus and he is capable of fashioning moving objects out of metal, bronze, wood, ivory and gemstones. He has mastered the art of tightly coiling leaves of steel into powerful springs, which control wheels and chains to form intricate and marvellous mechanisms that mark the passage of the hours with great precision and accuracy, or control the levels of watercourses. There is nothing this cunning man cannot contrive in his workshop. There are moving statues there, men and women animated by his skill, boxes that play music and devices that can awaken him in the morning. Even if only half the stories of what Daedalus can achieve are true then you can be certain that no more cunning and clever an inventor, architect and craftsman has ever walked this earth. ~ Stephen Fry

It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man. ~ Michelangelo

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals. ~ Deborah Moggach

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I was the chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the chief architects the last time we balanced a budget, and it was the first time we had done it since man walked on the moon. We had a $5 trillion surplus and we cut taxes. ~ John Kasich

Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators. ~ Zachary M. Schrag

When it comes to government policy, can we please stop using words like "architect"? Telling people what to do is not a skilled profession. ~ David Burge

The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement. We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended. ~ N. T. Wright

If we see a house, CLEANTHES, we conclude, with the greatest certainty, that it had an architect or builder; because this is precisely that species of effect which we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm, that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house, that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect. ~ David Hume

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear. ~ Anatole France

I fantasise about what the future could be in terms of aesthetic and psychology. It's the most difficult thing to do because you have to start from the past - your favourite architect, your favourite song - you take it all with you. ~ Raf Simons

A truly great structure, one that is meant to stand the tests of time, never disregards its environment. A serious architect takes that into account. He knows that if he wants presence, he must consult with nature. ~ Christopher Plummer

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder. ~ John Ruskin

A piece of art, when completed, encapsulates its own reality. As its architect, the artist's task is to craft it well enough that the reader believes in its existence and is willing to enter, explore, and engage based on the artist's version of the truth, even if that truth is artifice. ~ Kate Kearns

It's a scientific fact that there are only a handful of jobs you're allowed to have if you're one of the leads in a romantic comedy: dog walker, architect, kindergarten teacher, cupcake chef, florist, special needs veterinarian, suspiciously well-paid magazine writer, and independent bookstore owner. So it stands to reason that the likelihood of meeting your soul mate in one is high. ~ Una LaMarche

At about five I knew I was going to be an architect because my mother had studied architecture. I thought it was women's work. I had a proprietary feeling about architecture. I could own it because my mother owned it. ~ Denise Scott Brown

Every decision you've made will impact how things go. The player's also the
architect of what happens. ~ Casey Hudson

Immortal existence..

Sometimes Living is not such an easy task..
Being here or there..
The spirit is the same.. Only changes the place where shows..
Here, the make-up is of meat.. There is infinite LIGHT..
In the flesh, or out of it , what does order is what thinks and what creates..
Each thought, a vibration..
Each action, a reaction..
That doesn't change with the death of the body.. Because actually nobody dies..
We are immortal divine existences.. Believing or not..
So many lives.. So many experiences..
So many faces.. So many dreams..
To each life new opportunities.. New learnings..
The soul Request.. Thirsty to experiment, feels, develop, evolve, grow and so it goes..
The spirit Obeys.. Enters and exit the perishable bodies..
Gets right and misses.. rehearses, Conquers and proceeds..
The spirit is a gift of the architect of the universe for the benefit of all..
It's light.. it's love.. it's eternal..
In the Astral or in the Earth.. There is to educate the thought and to clean the energies around yourself..
Gives some work to do that spiritual maintenance, but it is worthwhile.
It is Light that cleans the Light!
So never forget you are imperishable consciousness..
May a light circle involves and illuminate each soul..
Much light and love in each heart that pulses in the heart of the whole..
Namaste,
Dave ~ Dave Zebian

Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters. ~ Ross Macdonald

I have approached the buildings as psychological and poetic manifestations - rather than from the more technical viewpoints of the architect and historian (which mostly miss the living spirit behind the forms). ~ Clarence John Laughlin

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live. ~ Igor Stravinsky

As strange as it may seem, this decision is one of the options that a good architect leaves open. A system that is written as a monolith, and that depends on that monolithic structure, cannot easily be upgraded to multiple processes, multiple threads, or micro-services should the need arise. By comparison, an architecture that maintains the proper isolation of its components, and does not assume the means of communication between those components, will be much easier to transition through the spectrum of threads, processes, and services as the operational needs of the system change over time. ~ Robert C. Martin

I heard a story once in the Orient about two architects who went to see the Buddha. They had run out of money on their projects and hoped the Buddha could do something about it. 'Well, I'll do what I can,' said the Buddha, and he went off to see their work. The first architect was building a bridge, and the Buddha was very impressed. 'That's a very good bridge,' he said, and he began to pray. Suddenly a great white bull appeared, carrying on its back enough gold to finish construction. 'Take it,' said the Buddha, 'and build even more bridges.' And so the first architect went away very happy. The second architect was building a wall, and when the Buddha saw it he was equally impressed. 'That's a very good wall,' he said solemnly, and began to pray. Suddenly the sacred bull appeared, walked over to the second architect, and sat on him. ~ Colin Higgins

It was during this period of work that Varda began to conceive a more theoretical approach to her art. She says, "[My work] deals with this question, 'What is cinema?' through how I found specific cinematic ways of telling what I was telling. I could have told you the same things that are in the film by just talking to you for six hours. But instead I found shapes" (Warwick). To give a name to her very particular and personal search for a cinematic language, Varda coined the term cinécriture. As she explains to Jean Decock: "When you write a musical score, someone else can play it, it's a sign. When an architect draws up a detailed floor plan, anyone can build his house. But for me, there's no way I could write a scenario that someone else could shoot, since the scenario doesn't represent the writing of the film." Later she would clarify, "The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing its called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture." (Varda par Agnès [1994], 14). ~ T. Jefferson Kline

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; ~ Stewart Brand

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more. ~ Thom Mayne

A great teacher is the architect of a great future. ~ Debasish Mridha

I am a bit obsessive of being as original as possible. I try not to repeat anything I have done before in my new projects ~ Aurelio Vazquez Duran

He could seek no object in life now, because now he had faith - not faith in any sort of principles, or words, or ideas, but faith in a living, ever-palpable God. In old days he had sought Him in the aims he set before himself. That search for an object in life had been only a seeking after God; and all at once in his captivity he had come to know, not through words or arguments, but by his own immediate feeling, what his old nurse had told him long before; that God is here, and everywhere. In his captivity he had come to see that the God in Karataev was grander, more infinite, and more unfathomable than the Architect of the Universe recognised by the masons. He felt like a man who finds what he has sought at his feet, when he has been straining his eyes to seek it in the distance. All his life he had been looking far away over the heads of all around him, while he need not have strained his eyes, but had only to look in front of him.

In old days he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable, and the infinite in anything. He had only felt that it must be somewhere, and had been seeking it. In everything near and comprehensible, he had seen only what was limited, petty, everyday, and meaningless. He had armed himself with the telescope of intellect, and gazed far away into the distance, where that petty, everyday world, hidden in the mists of distance, had seemed to him great and infinite, simply because it was not clearly seen. Such had been European life, ~ Leo Tolstoy

My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city. ~ Richard Ernst

I think that (Alister) MacKenzie and I managed to work as a completely sympathetic team. Of course there was never any question that he was the architect and I was the advisor and consultant. No man learns to design a golf course simply by playing golf, no matter how well. But it happened that both of us were extravagant admirers of the Old Course at St Andrews and we both desired as much as possible to simulate seaside conditions insofar as the differences in turf and terrain would allow. ~ Bobby Jones

It doesn't say much. Only "Howard Roark, Architect". But it's like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It's a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth - and do you know how much suffering there is on earth? - all the pain comes from that thing y ... ou are going to face. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world - and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you - or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You're on your way to hell, Howard. ~ Ayn Rand

Gratitude is an attitude that hooks us up to our source of supply. And the more grateful you are, the closer you become to your maker, to the architect of the universe, to the spiritual core of your being. It's a phenomenal lesson. ~ Bob Proctor

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that's just what we do find inside us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Form ever follows function. ~ Louis Sullivan

As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. ~ Norman Foster

In this business, you don't have to be an architect or an engineer or a brick layer. But you have to understand how the money flows. That you can only understand if you're on the site. ~ Harry Triguboff

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build. ~ Leon Krier

It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. ~ David Foster Wallace

I'm strong-willed. Architects are strong-willed. You get the best results with a strong client and a strong architect working together. ~ Eli Broad

told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karataev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The computer-simulated dreamworld of the Matrix trilogy is a technological version of Descartes's evil demon. In essence it represents the idea of a mind (the Architect) more powerful than our own that is intent on deceiving us whenever, and however, it sees fit. ~ William Irwin

The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect. ~ Uell Stanley Andersen

When the Americans are behind you, they're behind you 100%, and this gives you real confidence as an architect. They expect you to lead a building project - to make the kind of big and costly decisions that, in Britain, have been handed over to project managers and cost-cutters. ~ David Chipperfield

Likewise 'radical'. I'm only radical because the architectural profession has got lost. Architects are such a dull lot - and they're so convinced that they matter. ~ Cedric Price