No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.
At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.
To me, a building – if it’s beautiful – is the love of one man, he’s made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
I don’t believe in morality in architecture.
A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.
Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.
The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.
Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.
No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.
For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.
We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don’t go anywhere. They shouldn’t be restless.
I am but an architectural composer.
I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.
In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.
The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.
I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
I live in a craftsman house, but I’m a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.
Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.
