ABA Architects holds its weekly staff meeting on Monday. Tradition has held that each meeting begins with a quote (attributed to an architect or not) from a staff member who agreed to provide one at the meeting the week before. Here is sampling of quotes that have been submitted over the past few of years. Enjoy!
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"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light."
- Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
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"All architects want to live beyond their deaths."
- Philip Johnson (1906-2005)
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"If you’re looking to find the key to the universe, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is: There is no key to the universe. The good news is: It has been left unlocked."
- Swami Beyondananda (1947- )
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"Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
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"Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space."
- Arthur Erickson (1924- )
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"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibly never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"
- Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
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"Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new."
- Helmut Jahn (1940- )
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"A building is like a soap bubble. This bubble is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed and regulated from the inside. The exterior is the result of an interior."
- Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
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"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)
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"Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog."
- James Thurber (1894-1961)
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"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together."
- Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
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"How often do we say 'I can't' before we have explored the possibilities of 'I can'?"
- Anonymous
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"The oldest, shortest words - 'yes' and 'no' - are those which require the most thought."
- Pythagoras (582 B.C.-507 B.C.)
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"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."
- Frank Gehry (1929- )
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"Architects believe that not only do they sit at the right hand of God, but that if God ever gets up, they take the chair."
- Karen Moyer
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"If a building becomes architecture, then it is art."
- Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971)
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"But mom, I am one of the greatest architects of all times; I'm the founder of modern architecture. I can't do a traditional house for y...Ouch! Okay, okay..."
- Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
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"To me, the drawn language is a very revealing language. One can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect."
- Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)
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"Education is not the filling of the bucket, but the lighting of a fire."
- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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"Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour."
- Fidel Castro (1926- )
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"In every case, the site is the beginning of the building that aspires to architecture. And this is true whatever the site or building may be."
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
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"All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
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"If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is no. If you don't stpe forward, you're always in the same place."
- Nora Roberts (1950- )
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"If you have built castles on the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should b e. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
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"A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigor and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies and trivilalities."
- Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
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"Just as the proportions of voices are harmony to the ear, those of measurement are harmony to the eye."
- Andrea Palladio (1508-1580)
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"Architecture is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we belive in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstanding and provide a beautiful context for life's drama."
- Frank Gehry (1929- )
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