R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

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.

My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city.

I practised as an architect for 10 years. I qualified in 1973 with a fellowship diploma of architecture. World Series Cricket gave me the freedom to go out and pursue architecture.

In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

Architects like to work in a problematic environment.

We forget the importance of engineering, but it's been used to design everything from St. Paul's Cathedral to The Shard.

We need architects to be visionaries.

I may not be the most interesting architect, but I'm still out there and have maintained some position of integrity.

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

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" Yes." My dear fellow, who will let you?" That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. ... At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

Modern building has become so universally conditioned by optimized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited.

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

The architect holds much knowledge, but is not a specialist. Especially with the computer and technology, the amount of knowledge an architect possesses keeps on growing.

I am going to design, in a great hurry, and I believe to build a station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc. etc. It is at Paddington, in cutting, and admitting of no exterior, all interior and all roofed in.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

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.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.