''Where do architects and designers get their ideas?'' The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as ''salon art.'' Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Architecture is petrified music.
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.
Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.
Don't fight forces, use them.
Form ever follows function.
Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.