Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

Architecture is always the will of the age conceived as space - nothing else. Until this simple truth is clearly recognized, the struggle over the foundation of a new architecture confident in its aims and powerful in its impact cannot be realized; until then, it is destined to remain a chaos of uncoordinated forces.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

Fashion, historically, is how people make statements about themselves or communicate.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation.

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.

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

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.

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.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

Architecture is the work of nations

You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.

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

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.