We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don't go anywhere. They shouldn't be restless.
Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.
The interior of the house personifies the private world the exterior of it is part of the outside world.
If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.
Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.
Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.
Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things that's all.
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.
The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.
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.
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.
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.
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
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.
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.
The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines.
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.
My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.
In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.
Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.
Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.
I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.
As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.