Quotes About Design

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

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.

Space is the breath of art.

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass — not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy.

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.

Architecture is life, or at least life itself taking form. . . the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or will ever be lived.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

Winston Churchill wisely said, "First we shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us." Exegete the architecture of a typical church building and you'll quickly discover that it effectively teaches the church to be passive.

Whenever I design any variant, or when anybody sends me one, I always say if at all possible within the context of the game don't have two home supply centers touching each other.

The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name.1 —Christopher Alexander

There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.

You know the definition of the perfectly designed machine.... The perfectly designed machine is one in which all its working parts wear out simultaneously. I am that machine.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.