“In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.”

If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.

. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.

Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There’s no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.

That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.

I wish I could say I’m an architect and planned it this way, foresaw doing all these things, but honestly, I’ve been lucky that things have come across my path and they’ve worked out well for me.

he architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

You are the mental architect of your own destiny.

Through True Love, she merges with Him. She who does not know her Husband Lord, the Architect of karma, is deluded by falsehood she herself is false.

Each man the architect of his own fate.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.