Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

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

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

Outside of advertising, the person who's influenced me most is quite possibly Frank Gehry.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

I'm not an architectural composer.

I'm well into sort of Santiago Calatrava and people like that.

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

Personally, one of the greatest sources of inspiration for my work has been architecture. I've had the chance to see so many exquisite structures, whether they are historical monuments or modern commercial premises.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.

Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

I did not want to do stereotypical buildings.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.

My first impression of Beverly Hills was that it had a landscape of small houses built by famous architects, so I didn't want to make a big block or sculpture here; I wanted to make a community rooted to the place.

I'm really into architecture, I'm a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I'm a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.

In China, we had some buildings that looked like the White House or wine bottles. All they seemed to represent was bad taste.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

I think architects design outside in. Or they design basically outside. They don't get in the building anymore.

I am trying to represent design through drawing. I have always drawn things to a high degree of detail. That is not an ideological position I hold on drawing but is rather an expression of my desire to design and by extension to build. This has often been mistaken as a fetish I have for drawing: of drawing for drawing’s sake, for the love of drawing. Never. Never. Yes, I love making a beautiful, well-crafted drawing, but I love it only because of the amount of information a precise drawing provides

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