Professional Documents
Culture Documents
"Architectural Quotes": Frank Lloyd Wright
"Architectural Quotes": Frank Lloyd Wright
• A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he
doesn't afterward.
• All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
• An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a
wrecking bar at the site.
• An expert is a man who has stopped thinking - he knows!
• Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard
pies; you can't nail them to a wall.
• Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the
world.
• Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function
should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
• Get the habit of analysis- analysis will in time enable synthesis to become
your habit of mind.
• Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
• God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often
been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say
that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
• Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
• I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.
• I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's
hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited
by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.
• I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from
too intimate contacts with my own furniture.
• I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as
a ponderous anarchronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.
• I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's
start with typewriters.
• If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
• New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a
race for rent.
• No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill.
Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the
other.
• No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could
never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor
less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
• Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of
culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore
imminent downfall.
• Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort,
expressed in organic simplicity.
• Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning,
buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married
to the ground.
• Simplicity and repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of
art.
• Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any
work of art.
• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
• The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if
he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.
• The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms
should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in
hand with beauty.
• The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
• The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
• The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his
client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build
their first buildings.
• The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fill
citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the
voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
• "Think simple" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of
its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
• Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
• We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks
economically, just as we are architecturally.
• Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll Le Corbusier go write four
books about it.
• Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it
begins.
• Less is more.
• Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved
enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy
a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.
Rem Koolhaas
• A new icon is formed... not the predictable two-dimensional tower soaring
skyward but a truly three-dimensional experience.
• Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has
been from the very beginning.
• If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try
to do things with it.
• Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very
careful who we educate.
• The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal
shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build
a shoebox.
• The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team
to address any issue.
• The work in S,M,L,XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that
our office almost went bankrupt.
• Usually people in my position are polite about what other architects do,
but in this case I find it interesting to really go on the warpath against
offices like SOM, KPF or anyone else who is doing huge, thoughtless
towers and see what happens.
• We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
• What we have been successfully doing in the last five years is invading
territories where we had not been invited.
Louis Kahn
• A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through
measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be
unmeasurable.
• Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
• Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and
the column became.
• I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for
lies.
• Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as
much as they need bread or a place to sleep.