I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.
Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.
Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
The building’s identity resided in the ornament.
My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.
Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.
Architecture is invention.
Whatever good things we build end up building us.
When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature – this very unique to Japan.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
I call architecture frozen music.
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
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.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.
Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.
Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.
