40 quotes that will make you love architecture … even more

I am a firm believer of love at first sight ,but with architecture it happened to me the other way around. I knew from my early years of life on this earth that I wanted to be an architect but that did not mean that I was in love with design from the beginning ,architecture started its inhabitation within my own body very slowly, like a “fungus” spreads its roots and occupies your whole existence.
Quite recently I’ve celebrated my 40th birthday which for every woman is THE landmark of birthdays for many reasons.
The big FOUR ZERO is a time upon to reflect on your life lived up to this point, your life choices, your life achievements and most definitely for the work driven people out there ,your career.
To be in love and to love are two completely different concepts which took me many years to differentiate and to appreciate each one for its own purpose in life.
After this deep conflict of my own on this matter ended ,believe it or not I started loving architecture even more.
In this text I am giving u 40 quotes to start loving architecture even more ,one for every year of my existence.

1. “I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do?” — Frank O. Gehry, FAIA

2. “If you want an easy life, don’t be an architect. Ask anybody in my office. You have to work all the time. If you want a nine-to-five job and to go home and relax, just don’t do it.”
ZAHA HADID-2015 Huffington Post

 

3. The sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building.
– Louis Kahn

4. You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on
The construction site. – Frank Lloyd Wright

5. As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the
Past ,for a future which is essentially unknown. – Norman Foster

6. There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one? ― Zaha Hadid

7.Architecture is the art of how to waste space. – Philip Johnson

8. I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good. – Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe

9. Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight
against gravity. – Renzo Piano

 

 

 

10. I see music as fluid architecture.- Joni Mitchell

 

 

11. 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.
-Bob Dylan.

12. The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
-Salvador Dali

 

 

 

13. My buildings are more famous than me. – Jean Nouvel

 

14. I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.– Le Corbusier

15. God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it.
Everything else is, at least for me, an abuse of paper. – Alvar Aalto

 

16. The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we
have no soul of our own civilization. –Frank Lloyd Wright

 

17. Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great
original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. -Frank Lloyd Wright

18. Architecture is invention. – Oscar Niemeyer

 

19. Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works
collaborate with the creator. -Antoni Gaudi

 

 

20. 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.
-Louis Kahn

 

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

22. When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature – this very unique to Japan.
–Tadao Ando

23. Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together. – —Alvar Aalto

24. Architecture is the reaching out for the truth. – Louis Kahn

25. 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. -Ai Weiwei

26.  Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.- Rem Koolhaas

27. I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more. -Thom Mayne

28. Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings.
– Vitruvius

29. But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour. -Thom Mayne

30. 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. -Frank Stella

31. 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.- David Allan Coe

32. Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise. -Adolf Loos

33. I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It’s about space and form and it’s something you can share with other people. -Donna Karan

34. Cities are the greatest creations of humanity. -Daniel Libeskind

35. To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it. —–Daniel Libeskind

36. The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines. -Saul Steinberg

37. My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we – architects – can effect the quality of life of the people.
Richard Rogers

38. I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
-Ayn Rand

39. 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.
–VictorHugo

40. My buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone.
-Julia Morgan

This last quote is dedicated to all women architects out there ,I hope u can all relate to ,this comes from my personal favorite Zaha Hadid
“Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there’s no reason for it to be. I don’t want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.”
I am deliberately not counting this last one as the 41st quote as it stands for an excuse bridge for my next article to come , so to be continued…until next time.

Marilena Sifaki