John Simon Quotes

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

I love flying buttresses!

The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

I wanted to be an architect. I used to draw houses and buildings and construct buildings on my own.

I'm very interested in architecture.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

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

I wanted a real profession. And I'd always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what's kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don't.

Architecture students are generally given theoretical projects, often located at distant locations, and told to come up with a design.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

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.

I've built a tree house; because of my architectural training, it's heavily over-designed, with an oriel window sticking out of it and flying foxes coming off it.

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.

Our fresh technical resources have furthered the disintegration of solid masses of masonry into slender piers, with consequent far-reaching economies in bulk, space, weight, and haulage.

The essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during Old Saturn evolution.

Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part.

New synthetic substances - steel, concrete, glass - are actively superseding the traditional raw materials of construction.

When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."