Alexander Jackson Davis Quotes

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

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.

Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.

The architect is not only the director, but he is the composer. And, as a composer, the architect brings a sense of creativity to each building.

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

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.

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.

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

I want to explore my design philosophy in different mediums, and I'm very interested in architecture.

Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.

Architecture is by definition a very collaborative process.

My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city.

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

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

Art has definitely influenced how I think of design, both as individual items and as a body of work.

I'm very interested in architecture.

People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.

In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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

I would have loved to have been an architect - which, actually, would have been a disaster.

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.

I think a lot of people have the Frank Lloyd Wright model in their brains. The architect comes in with this act of creation and lays it down, and that's it. But that's not me.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.