All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account.
I know we can’t have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.
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.
I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.
If you’re going to have centralization, why not have it!
Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy.
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.
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.
Each material has its own message.
The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you’re an atheist, pretend how God would do it.
From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn’t fastened down slides into Southern California.
I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.
What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.
Architecture is the frame of human existence. We must dedicate this existence more to beauty. For if poetic principle has deserted us, how long are we going to last?
If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.
What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life- Integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so integrity is the deepest quality in a building... if we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature- the psyche- of our democratic society... Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for integrity not only in the life of those who did the building but socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable.
As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal – something we are to become – some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish.
The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of the earth that the plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man’s life upon earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!
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.
You will find Goodness and Truth everywhere you go. If you have to choose, choose Truth. For that is closest to Earth. Keep close to the Earth,... : in that lies strength. Simplicity of heart is just as necessary for an architect as for a farmer or a minister if the architect is going to build great buildings.