Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

Architecture has curled up in a ball and it's about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you're not sure if it's good or bad but at least it's interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future.

Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.

People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

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

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

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.

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can't separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building.

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

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

There is a role and function for beauty in our time.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

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.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

Every president is not only a new president. He comes in a new age.

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.