Rafael Moneo Quotes

I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.

You can't escape the influence of architectural history.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

The building art is, in reality, always the spatial execution of spiritual decisions. It is bound to its times and manifests itself only in addressing vital tasks with the means of its times. A knowledge of the times, its tasks, and its means is the necessary precondition of work in the building art.

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

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

History is what we would make of it.

The context of history proved invaluable.

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

From Brighton to Bradford, from Suffolk to Somerset, I have explored some remarkable buildings and structures that, in different ways, have helped to shed light on the way modern Britain has developed.

Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names.

In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

For me, clothing has always been connected to history. That's what draws me in.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

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

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture.