Architectural Vision Quotes

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.

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?

Frank Gehry designs buildings that make other architects half his age (he's 78) gasp with envy. Neotony is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance in his head.

An architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist.

The pursuit of peace resembles the building of a great cathedral. It is the work of a generation. In concept it requires a mater-architect; in execution, the labors of many.

I’m a passionate architect... I do not work for money

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.

Who knows, maybe I am simply a talented architect?

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

I used to walk in the burnt up Harlem of the '80s, and I'd look at brownstones that were dilapidated or apartment buildings, thinking 'Whoever designed this and built this did not want it to look like this.' So, I used to visualize one day being able to contribute and build in Harlem.

Through training, practice, and a deep sense of optimism, architects see opportunities where others only see a void. This has been the driving principle behind Architecture for Humanity since our founding.

When I look back, there was obviously the arch of my creativity and when I was young, I used to go to open homes with my mother and I used to imagine how I could make the space better and how people would live in it.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."

We need architects to be visionaries.

When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.

My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.

Architects always have a feel for time - the generation they live in - as we do, and they are always striving toward boundless adventure.

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.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it.

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you're talking about building a house, you're talking about dreams.

It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.

Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.