Arne Jacobsen Quotes

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

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

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

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

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

I'm very interested in 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.

I love architecture.

If you examine this, I think that you will find that it's the mechanics of Japanese architecture that have been thought of as the direct influence upon our architecture.

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

Building design isn't trendy.

Architecture is invention.

I wanted a real profession. And I'd always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what's kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don't.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

There are so many constraints on the architect that public buildings almost never feel free or enjoyable.

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.

Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.

I haven't done any building designs since the Loaf House.

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.

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.