David Chipperfield Quotes

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

I think I'd be quite good at Builder, like designer, construction... I've always liked making things. I'm quite good with my hands. So I think I'd be quite good at designing new inventions.

Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. I'm not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.

I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from.

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

Well-building hat three conditions. Commodity, firmness, and delight.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

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

To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

It is the accuracy and detail inherent in crafted goods that endows them with lasting value. It is the time and attention paid by the carpenter, the seamstress and the tailor that makes this detail possible.

Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.

Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go... it's just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available.

Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Almost every time I make a building, some people will condemn it straight to Hell.