Minoru Yamasaki Quotes

When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, 'Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?' Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.

Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

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.

With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building.

Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole.

The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.

Building design isn't trendy.

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.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

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

The ultimate goal of the architect...is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture... should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.

The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

I guess I can't be a great architect. Great architects have a recognizable style. But if every building I did were the same, it would be pretty boring.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.

Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.