PHILIP JOHNSON

"All architects want to live beyond their deaths."

"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."
KENZO TANGE
"The city must be subject to growth, decay and
renewal."

"Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to

regard themselves as no more than just ordinary
citizens without the power to reform the future."
"Modern architecture need not be western."
OSCAR NIEMEYER
"Form follows beauty."
"Architecture will always express the technical and
social progress of the country in which it is carried
out. If we wish to give it the human content that it
lacks, we must participate in the political struggle."
"Architecture must have liberty of forms."
"Architecture is invention."
IEOH MING PEI
"Symbolisms and blasphemies."
"Architecture is the expression of the past."
FRANK GEHRY
"Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind,
a lot of excuses, The client made me do this. The city
made me do this. Oh the budget. I don't believe that
anymore."
"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but
yearn for timelessness."
ROBERT VENTURI
"Form accommodates function."
"Less is bore."
"Unity disguised as chaos-complexity and
contradiction
are often what make works of art both exciting
and profound."
TADAO ANDO
"I would like my architecture to inspire people to use
their own resources, to move into the future."
"Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot
fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between
the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use
architecture to reconcile the two."
RENZO PIANO
"Architects spend an entire life with this
unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity."
JEAN NOUVEL
"Each new situation requires a new architecture."
"I think architecture has to be a gift."
ALVAR AALTO
"Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing
with separated problems. If we split life into separate
problem we split the possibilities to make good
building art."
ADOLF LOOS
"Does it follow that the house has nothing in common
with art and is architecture not to be included in the
arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs
to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else
that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the
domain of art."
"Ornament is a crime and all ornamentation must be
rejected."
"Lift the building in the ground."
"Supply and demand regulate architecture form."
ANTONIO GAUDI
"Form does not necessarily follow function."
AUGUSTE PERRET
"Truth is indispensable to architecture and
architectural lie concepts."
BENJAMIN H. LATROBE
"A building is the combination of different geometric
figures."
BUCKMINSTER FULLER
"We called architects of the future not its victims'
'Starting with holes'."
EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA
"Drawing architecture is a schizoid act: It involves
reducing the world into a piece of paper."
EERO SAARINEN
"Function influence but does not dictate form."
"Spiritual function is inseparable from practical
function."
ELIEL SAARINEN
"Architecture - form equals social - form"
"Beauty grows from necessity not from repetition of
formulas."
ERICH MENDELSOHN
"Architecture seizes upon space, encompasses
space and is space itself."
"Architecture depends on the sensuous seizure by
means of touch and sight."
DANIEL BURNHAM
"Make big plans; aim high in hope and hope and
work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram
once recorded will not die."
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's
blood."
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
"Every great architect is necessarily - a great poet.
He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his
day, his age."
"Architecture is organic."
"The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If
you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find
yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But
if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the
day of your life."
"Think simples as my old master used to say -
meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the
simplest terms, getting back to first principles."
"An idea is salvation by imagination."
"Form and function are one."
"The reality of a building is not the container but the
space within."
"The architect is a molder of men, whether or not he
consciously assumes responsibility."
"Nature spelled with a capital N the way you spell
God with a capital G."
"Organic architecture: all parts are related to the
whole as the whole was related to the parts;
continuity and integrity."
PIERRE LUIGI NERVI
"Architecture is a synthesis of the technology and
art."
"Structural correctness is identical with
functional, technical and economic truthfulness."
JOHN RUSKIN
"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a
most important truth, that no architecture can be truly
noble which is not imperfect."
"It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead,
to restore anything that has ever been great or
beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted
upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given
only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never
be recalled."
LE CORBUSIER
"Architecture or revolution"
"The exterior of the building is the result of the
interior."
"A cube within a cube."
"Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent
play of masses brought together in light."
"Space and light and order. These are the things men
need just as much they need bread or place to
sleep."
"The styles are a lie."
ANTONIO GAUDI
"Straight lines belong to man, curved lines belong to
God."
MARCEL BRUER
"Nature and architecture are two different things."
WALTER GROPIUS
"Art and architecture, the new unity"
"Machine is to be our modern medium of design."
LOUIS KAHN
"Architecture is the reaching out for the truth."
"Every time a student walks past and really urgent,
expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his
college, it can help reassure him that he does have
that mind, does have that soul."
"A house is a house."
"Architecture built not for need, but for art."
LOUIS SULLIVAN
"Form follows function."
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
"Less is more."
"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into
space."
"God is in the details."
"It is better to be good than to be original."
"Less is more, almost"
"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks
together. There it begins."
LUCIO COSTA
"I am neither a capitalist nor a socialist, I am not a
religious or an atheist."
"Each one sees whatever he wishes to see."
MARCEL LAJOS BREUER
"Architecture is a social art."
MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLIO
"Architecture must meet 3 requirements: Strength,
Beauty, and Utilities."
"Architecture is a science arising out of many other
sciences, and adorned with much and varied
learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed
of those works which are the result of other arts."
RICHARD ROGERS
"Design is how, form is what."

OTTO WAGNER
"Nothing that is not practical can be beautiful."
"Essential basis of natural forms as geometries"

MINORU YAMASAKI
"Humanism"
MICHAEL GRAVES
"Design as if you are a child."
"Classical forms language of both the arctuated and
trabeated models."
ADOLF LOOS
"Ornament equals crime."
"Lift the building in the ground."
CHARLES RENEE MACKINTOSH
"Modern ideas in modern dress."
"Design by living men for living men."
ROBERT MAILART
Mushroom slab construction
"A bridge is like a house."
ERICH MENDELSOHN
Fluid mass theory
"Architecture is the only tangible expression of
space."
RICHARD NUETRA
"A house is like a flower pot."
RICHARD NUETRA
"Most important material is man."
REM KOOLHAAS
"The client is chaos."
"The integration of notion of cheapness to create
sublime conditions"
OTTO WAGNER
"A town in a town"
ALVAR AALTO
"Form is the mystery that defies description but
brings people pleasure."
PAUL RUDOLPH
"Automobile is the most important organizing
element in the structure."
WALTER GROPIUS
"Architecture begins where engineering ends."
MARCEL BRUER
"A building has straight geometrical lines. Even when
these lines are free, it must always be evident that
they have been studied and that they did not spring
up simultaneously."
ARCHITECT’S DICTUM