John Ruskin Quotes

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

The artistic part of us all - I think that the easiest way to appreciate this - is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.

In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

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.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Buildings designed with careful attention to aesthetics arouse and enlighten their occupants and that promotes their good health.

I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.

I am but an architectural composer.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.