Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

Don't just look at buildings ... watch them.

No house should ever be on any hill or anything. It should be of the hill, so hill and house can live together each the happier for the other.

Rattling the bones is not architecture. Less is only more where more is no good.

The art of architecture studies not structure in itself, but the effect of structure on the human spirit.

(Architecture) is music in space, as it were a frozen music.

Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling place always finds an inhabitant.

It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

By early 1943, the Pentagon was complete-a building big enough to house forty thousand people and all their accoutrements, the largest building in the world, conceived, funded, designed and constructed in a little more than a year. And on the day it was finished, it was already too small.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise the client to plant vines.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

The job of the architect becomes more difficult in this secular age. Where once he had a god to extol, he now has humans like himself; where once he had he, he now has she and they.

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.