The best inspirational architecture quotes will tell you about the great skills, and creative mindset of architects. The definition of Architecture is the art or practice of designing and building structures and especially habitable ones.
A person gives a form to his creative imagination through architecture. In the below inspirational architecture quotes you will get to know that architecture is a visual art and without it, our own civilization does not exist. According to most famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own civilization.” You can also read our other inspirational quotes about arrogance, inspiring art quotes, attraction quotes, and team spirit quotes.
Let’s read the collection of best inspirational architecture quotes to know about the creative mindset.
1. “A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.” ― Ayn Rand
2. “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright
3. “A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” ― Louis Kahn
4. “A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement of the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.” ― Cedric Price
5. “A house can have integrity, just like a person,’ said Roark, ‘and just as seldom.” ― Ayn Rand
6. “A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it.” ― Ayn Rand
7. “A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.” ― Ezra Pound
8. “A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.” ― Guillaume Apollinaire
9. “A tree becomes a tower, a tower regrows a tree.” ― Neri Oxman
10. “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” ― Robertson Davies
11. “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
12. “All buildings have a psychological as well as a purely visual effect on the landscape.” ― Elisabeth Beazley
13. “An architect can build for the future.” ― Anthony T. Hincks
14. “Architect without Pencil is like Rock-star without Guitar.” ― Vinayak Hanchate
15. “Architects are now on the look for materials and substances that can enhance biodiversity and rewild living systems.” ― Neri Oxman
16. “Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.” ― Toyo Ito
17. “Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.” ― John Portman
18. “Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.” ― Bryant H. McGill
19. “Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.” ― Kenzo Tange
20. “Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.” ― Bill Hillier
21. “Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.” ― Louis Kahn
22. “Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task, therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.” ― Adolf Loos
23. “Architecture begins where engineering ends.” ― Walter Gropius
Famous Architect Quotes for inspiration
24. “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.” ― Frank Stella
25. “Architecture cannot change the economic machinations of globalization.” ― Graham Owen
26. “Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.” ― Alain de Botton
27. “Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.” ― Spiro Kostof
28. “Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.” ― Julia Morgan
29. “Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” ― Yoshio Taniguchi
30. “Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” ― Constantin Brancusi
31. “Architecture is invention.” ― Oscar Niemeyer
32. “Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.” ― Harry Seidler
33. “Architecture is shaped by human emotions and desires, and then becomes a setting for further emotions and desires. It goes from the animate and inanimate and back again. For this reason, it is always incomplete or rather is only completed by the lives in and around it. It is background.” ― Rowan Moore
34. “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” ― Philip Johnson
35. “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” ― Le Corbusier
36. “Architecture is too slow in its realization to be a ‘problem solver’.” ― Cedric Price
37. “Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.” ― Louis Kahn
38. “Architecture led to the vanishing point which led to architecture.” ― Robin Evans
39. “Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.” ― Cedric Price
40. “Architecture should have little to do with problem-solving – rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible.” ― Cedric Price
41. “Architecture should reflect the past and the present with the future in mind.” ― Anthony T. Hincks
42. “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” ― Frank Gehry
43. “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.” ― Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
44. “Architecture strives to be the perfect embodiment of an idea as free as possible from all flaws or defects. It requires a process of methodical and relentless refinement.” ― Robert Steinberg
45. “Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.” ― Arne Jacobsen
Famous Architecture Quotes
46. “Art flouts convention. The convention became convention because it works.” ― Stewart Brand
47. “Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.” ― Leon Krier
48. “Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.” ― Bruce Jackson
49. “Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.” ― Alvar Aalto
50. “Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.” ― John Portman
51. “Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.” ― Leon Krier
52. “Design has killed architecture. Design is what they teach in the schools.” ― Le Corbusier
53. “Environment and development must go hand in hand, one cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the other.” ― Abhijit Naskar
54. “Every building is a prototype. No two are alike.” ― Helmut Jahn
55. “Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright
56. “Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.” ― Norman Foster
57. “Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture.” ― James C. Snyder
58. “Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.” ― Stephen Gardiner
59. “Good ideas come from everywhere. It’s more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.” ― Jeanne Gang
60. “Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.” ― Arthur Erickson
61. “I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.” ― Tadao Ando
62. “I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.” ― Ayn Rand
63. “I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.” ― Luis Barragan
64. “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.” ― Mies Van de Rohe
65. “I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people.” ― Donna Karan
66. “I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.” ― Maya Lin
67. “If we can scale the structure and function relationships found in trees and crustaceans – we will be able to architect buildings, including full scale towers, as living structures able to adapt and respond to their environment.” ― Neri Oxman
68. “Imagine that nature is the single most important client in the architectural practice.” ― Neri Oxman
69. “In a creative activity such as architecture, metaphor is less a threat to objective truth and more (to use another architectural metaphor) an arena of conceptual vitality – an arena being a performance area shareable with others.” ― Simon Unwin
Best Inspirational Architecture Quotes
70. “It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today’s blind architecture – a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!” ― André Breton
71. “It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller
72. “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.” ― David Allan Coe
73. “It’s about enabling the generation of materials and structures designed to interact, adapt and respond to the natural environment.” ― Neri Oxman
74. “Let us find harmony between concrete and nature. Without harming earth, let us build green skyscrapers.” ― Abhijit Naskar
75. “Let’s architect a future of synergy between the natural and the built environment.” ― Neri Oxman
76. “Literature and architecture experience the world in the same way, but arrive at different decisions, and look in different directions.” ― Christoph Grafe
77. “Melanin represents unity in the diversity of life on earth.” ― Neri Oxman
78. “No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.” ― John Ruskin
79. “Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.” ― Socrates
80. “Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings.” ― Vitruvius
81. “On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.” ― Ross Macdonald
82. “Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely place for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another.” ― Sally A. Kitt Chappell
83. “Sometimes we see a house built with such magnificent architecture that ‘Here, a real architect!’ we shout enthusiastically!” ― Mehmet Murat ildan
84. “Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.” ― Kevin McCloud
Famous Architecture Quotes for Portfolio
85. “The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.” ― Hugh Ferriss
86. “The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams.” ― Robert A. M. Stern
87. “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” ― Juhani Pallasmaa
88. “The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.” ― Saul Steinberg
89. “The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.” ― Victor Hugo
90. “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright
91. “The only direction not represented in their construction was vertical.” ― Lee Battersby
92. “The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.” ― Samuel Taylor Coleridge
93. “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” ― Michelangelo
94. “The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.” ― Christopher Wren
95. “The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.” ― Adolf Loos
96. “There is no truth in architecture, only proposition and a yearning for sense.” ― Simon Unwin
97. “They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar” ― Henry David Thoreau
98. “Through life and programmed decomposition – shelter becomes an organism, and the organism becomes a shelter.” ― Neri Oxman
99. “To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.” ― Daniel Libeskind
100. “To speak in nature’s language, we must prioritize bio-based structural materials; biopolymers. Biopolymers are natural polymers produced by the cells of living organisms.” ― Neri Oxman
101. “To speak in nature’s language, we must prioritize bio-based structural materials; biopolymers.” ― Neri Oxman
102. “Unlike blowing or forming glass, resulting in smooth and continuous surfaces; the printing of glass enables high levels of control over the shape and optical properties.” ― Neri Oxman
103. “Viewed from this perspective, architecture no longer provides a happy ending, but instead allows stories to continue.” ― Christoph Grafe
104. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller
105. “We might think of metaphor as a device belonging to the poetry of words but metaphor can also be non-verbal – visual, spatial, experiential… Metaphor is essential to the poetry of architecture too.” ― Simon Unwin
106. “We must consider the building not as an object but as a collaborative system tightly linked to its natural environment.” ― Neri Oxman
107. “We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they are graceful and pleasing in doing it.” ― John Ruskin
108. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” ― Winston S Churchill
109. “Whatever good things we build end up building us.” ― Jim Rohn
110. “When you make changes to preserve something, whether an artifact or an entire building, you risk altering the object and it’s history. However, if you don’t, you risk losing it entirely.” ― Mackenzie Finklea
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