35 Inspiring Quotes About Architecture by Famous Architects

I’m the kind of person who loves to travel to places with beautiful buildings, and I can spend hours just taking pictures of them. There is something about architecture that draws me in and makes me marvel at these massive works of art. From Gothic cathedrals and Baroque palaces to Art Nouveau facades and modern bridges, there is something about architectural styles that makes it impossible for me to pick just one favourite.

I often wonder what inspires the architects behind these creations, and if you’re an architecture lover like me, you may have wondered the same. That’s why I compiled a list of quotes about architecture from famous architects, part inspiration and part insight into their process. So, the next time you see a well-known building, you may appreciate it differently.

Inspirational role of architecture

Have you ever wondered why a building is just a building to some, while to others, it’s an awe-inspiring creation? That’s because architecture, in many ways, is an art form. Architects are like artists who blend art and functionality, but instead of using a canvas, they create structures. Great architects create amazing buildings that inspire others even when they’re gone. They are also some of the best sources for quotes about architecture since they live and breathe it.

Great architecture embodies harmony, serenity and a sense of belonging, making even the simplest spaces feel extraordinary. Think of places like the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Colosseum in Rome or the Palace of Versailles in France. These great beauties of architecture have the power to awe us and make us feel like we’re in the presence of something great.

Quotes about architecture

Here are some of my favourite quotes about architecture from famous architects.

Adolf Loos, Austrian architect

• Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task, therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Alvar Aalto, Finnish architect and designer

• The ultimate goal of the architect…is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture… should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.

• Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Bjarke Ingels, Danish architect

• I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.

• 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.

• I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It’s more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.

• When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, ‘Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?’ Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.

Frank Gehry, Canadian-American architect and designer

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

• Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

• It’s not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect and designer

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

• An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking bar at the site.

• A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

• Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

I. M. Pei, Chinese-American architect

• Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbours.

• Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

• It is good to learn from the ancients. I’m a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.

• The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.

Jean Nouvel, French architect

• Each new situation requires a new architecture.

• I like to play with architecture! It’s my favourite game.

Louis Kahn, American architect

• The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of its own and that this world of its own serves an institution.

• Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.

• If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it’s fine with me. I’m as interested in good architecture as anybody else.

Louis Sullivan, American architect

• Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German-American architect

• Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

• Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

• Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative.

Oscar Niemeyer, Brazilian architect

• The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.

• Architecture is invention.

• It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

• There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.

Norman Foster, English architect

• Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can’t separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building.

• As an architect, you design for the present with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown.

Luis Barragán, Mexican architect

• Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well-being.

• It is essential for an architect to know how to see: I mean to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.

Final thoughts on quotes about architecture

There is something inspiring about an architect who can use good design to turn an idea into a work of architecture. I love architecture, but I have no talent for it. That’s why I love reading quotes about architecture from those who can envision a great building and bring it to life. It makes me feel as if I can be a part of that idea, even if it’s through someone else.

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