“To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought. This is to be an artist.” – – Jacques-Louis David [1748 –1825] French painter in the Neoclassical style
“To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought. This is to be an artist.” – – Jacques-Louis David [1748 –1825] French painter in the Neoclassical style
“Every artist was first an amateur.” – – Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882] American essayist, lecturer, and poet
“The first job of the man who has a problem must be to become better acquainted with it. The way to do this is by producing an inadequate solution to the problem – a speculation – and by criticizing this. To understand a problem means, in effect, to understand its difficulties; and this cannot be done until we see why the more obvious solutions do not work Even in those cases where no satisfactory answer turns up we may learn something from this procedure.” – – William Bartley [1934-1990] American philosopher and author
“God is in the details.” – – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe [1886-1969] German American architect
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer, but to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.” – -Steve Jobs 1955-2011] American entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor
“If you could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.” – – Edward Hopper [1882-1967] American realist painter and printmaker
“Architecture tries to preserve body heat and ritual.” – – Hans Hollein [1934-2014] Austrian postmodern architect and designer
“Architecture is the knowing, correct, and magnificent play of forms beneath the sun.” – – Le Corbusier [1887-1965] Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer
“Architecture needs no explanation, and its reason-for-being comes with being built and inhabited. Too close a reliance on the verbal explanation reduces the building to the status of a footnote.” – – Robert McCarter [b. about 1953] American architect, author and educator
“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.” – – Geoffrey Jellicoe [1900-1996] English architect, town planner, landscape architect, garden designer and author
“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” – – Phillip Johnson [1906-2005] American architect advocating the the modernist then the postmodernist idiom
“As the project proceeded, committee piled atop committee, many members of the committees turned out to be ardent amateur architects disguised as bankers and insurance executives.” – – Brenden Gill [1914-1997] American writer and author writing in Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (1987)
“I would advise you to wait a while until your enthusiasm for your project has boiled over. Afterwards, you may return and consider it more carefully, when your judgment is no longer swayed by fondness for your design but guided by calm reason.” Leon Battista Alberti [1404-1472] Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomized the Renaissance man
“If architects focus only on compositional methods as means without ends, the ends will certainly be determined by forces outside of architecture – by those economic forces we find so prominent within the profession today, masquerading as ‘fashion’ and ‘style.” – – Robert McCarter [b. about 1953] American architect, author and educator
“There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.” – – Charles Renee Mackintosh [1868-1928] Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist
“Well-building hath three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.” – – Sir Henry Wotton [1568-1639] English author, diplomat and politician, writing in Elements of Architecture, adapting Vitruvius, Bk. 1. chapter iii
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