We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover...

The author meant it as a joke, Mr. Langdon. Ionic means containing ions—electrically charged particles. Most objects contain them.

Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture.

Googie architecture could…be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones....

To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a new style, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands...

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

I don’t know what London’s coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.(on Elgar)

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.

I think I have said enough.

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...

While for critics of sprawl the generic signifies a loss of local identity and connection to place, for Koolhaas it represents an opportunity for reinvention and fantasy free from nostalgia or provincial habit. He admires...

The Dome.” Perfectly round, this room is one continuous curved wall of books. A copper dome sits on top with four stained glass windows fitted tight to allow for natural light to stream in. The...

the only prospect which is really desirable or delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room […] where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first breath of the morning air,...

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

I call architecture frozen music.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the...

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this...

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you’ll forgive...

It’s about appreciating the quality of our architecture. It’s an asset that I want to be nurtured and strengthened rather than changed.

Le génie est un péché contre la masse.

Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as...

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.

Don’t fight forces, use them.

Les cités idéales étaient une pensée sociale en trois dimensions.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently...

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have...

This is the last hurrah for the current architecture. The next version of Microsoft’s consumer operating system, Windows 2000, will be based on [a Windows] NT kernel. The business user transition from Windows 95 to...

Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude

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.

Less is more!

..(l’architecte) il compose la musique que d’autres vont jouer. De plus, afin de vraiment comprendre ce qu’est l’architecture, il faut se rappeler que les gens qui l’interprètent ne sont pas des musiciens sensibles qui jouent...

the most important part of design is finding all the issues to be resolved. The rest are details

The cosmetic is cosmic.

Like medicine (architecture) must move from the curative to the preventive.

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as...

Architecture cannot change the economic machinations of globalization.

Nomadom je postao onda kada je o omjeru ljepote počeo razmišljati kao o ljubavnom odnosu između dvaju dijelova u kojem se suprotnosti privlače upravo magičnom snagom, a isti omjer jednako gospodari i arhitekturom i prirodom.

The word house didn’t begin to do justice for the white and gray structure in front of me. I actually had to tilt my head back to see all the way up to the roof.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body...

There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture.

…but there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as...

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

What is a staircase, but a corridor improved by elevation?

We’re looking mainly at renovating Webster and Main streets while taking advantage of the historic architecture.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. (1939)