Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs.

I actually feel like a very traditional architect.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Clothes if they are not well cut, you can kill nobody. A building poorly built can kill people. It's a much more difficult work. I would not compare myself with that.

The level of detail and craft is something that's inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.

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

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.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

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

Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.

I am an elder, and I am delighted to be an elder. I would like to exhibit [and] explore it more - what an elder could mean in this time. But, I'd like to show that elders are good for us - that they can be good for us.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

The house praises the carpenter.

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.

You have to do every detail on every bloody piece of the building. You have to know how the engineering works. You have to know how the fittings go together. You have to master the mechanical, electrical, acoustical - everything.

A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.

Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

My father was a master carpenter and builder. Architectural design, engineering design, mechanical design, three-dimensional views, that was my shtick, my forte.

One day we will all cherish the memory of having blacksmiths on every corner.

François Mitterrand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, "You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - you brought the new and the old together." But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.

Norfolk would not be Norfolk without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.