Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Style is trendy and fleeting.  Bad taste is timeless.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Ram-shack-le  /'ram-shak-el/  adj. :  Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.

 Man, there’s another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I’m interested in. (on using a grid)

The scary cousin in architecture’s dysfunctional family (on Frank Gehry)

 When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art. (On Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim as a place to experience art)

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.

Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon.

 Ignorance transcends architecture.

 The most important question when any new architecture is introduced is "So what?"

 When does a building actually become a built?

 ar-chi-tect  \är-ke-,tekt\  n. One who believes that conception comes before erection.

 Home is where you hang your Architect.

 Q:  What would I do if I won a million dollars? 

A:  Probably just keep practicing architecture till it was gone.

 We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.

 The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

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

 Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.

 All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

 I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.

 Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow.

 No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

 The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.

 Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

 No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

 Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

 Form ever follows function.

 Less is more.

 Less is a bore.

 Less is more work.

 Less is more, except when it is not enough…

 True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

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

 All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

 Architecture is "frozen music"… Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

 No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

 The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

 Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?

 Use your eyes; plagiarize.(On borrowing design strategies from other cultures.)

 Liberate the perimeter for the people! (On pushing the managers towards the core so that everybody can share the view in high rise offices.)

 [Architecture] is easy: you just stare at the paper until droplets of blood appear on your forehead.

 Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

 You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

 But what if we are dealing with fools? (On design juries)

 Commodity, firmness, delight...

 Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

 First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

 Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture.  I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends, and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.