Modern Architecture Quotes

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

Some authors regard morality in the same light as we regard modern architecture. Convenience is the first thing to be looked for.

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I'm not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.

Just growing up in Columbus, which is such a special place, small town with a Fortune 500 company's headquarters, the extraordinary modern architecture. The experiences that I've had growing up in that very unique hometown has shaped me and always will shape me.

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I want to try to come away from that one directional, clear rectangular form. It's not used because it's the most beautiful form; it's just the practical thing. That's why our TVs are rectangles. Even in modern architecture, they want us to believe, "That's the nicest, most beautiful thing." I love modern architecture, but actually it's that they cannot afford amorphous shapes or ornaments.

Modern architecture is not a style, it's an attitude

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

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.

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

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.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of authentic democracy.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

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.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.