John Ruskin Quotes

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.

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

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

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

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

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.

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

I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.

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

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

Good design doesn't date. Bad design does.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.