All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account.
So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal...
I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.
The best friend of earth of man is the tree.
The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.
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.