Mario Botta Quotes

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed.

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.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

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.

Architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.

Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one's entire life.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

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

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.

Architecture aims at Eternity.

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

When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.

Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.

Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.

The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.

I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling.