As an architect I have long looked up to my peers and to those who have gone before me for inspiration. Many of us take what these people have achieved around the world for granted but their work continues to motivate us and serve us each and every day. For me architecture has always been about functionality and the idea of home and community, as well as the art itself. The community aspect in particular excites me and I look at people like Pedro Martin Terra Group CEO who is running his company in a way that helps people like me, to build beautiful communities and buildings. With more businesses like this, we can create some wonderful places to live.
We can be inspired by the buildings that are created and have been left to us by other architects, and we can also play by the words that they wrote, let’s take a look at some of the best quotes on architecture for a little more inspiration.
“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
“We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.”
“Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational … architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”
― Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
“I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I’m in. I can also be a beach bum – I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.”— Cherie Lunghi
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks — Gilbert K. Chesterton
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” —Michelangelo Buonarroti
“The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius…”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
“The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.”
― Christopher Wren
Beautiful words from some incredible minds, the perfect inspiration for any architect.