Arne Jacobsen Quotes

We must be as familiar with the functions of our building as with our materials. We must learn what a building can be, what it should be, and also what it must not be.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings.

Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.

I'm not an interior decorator; I'm a designer, and that includes the architecture. The package must be strong and controlled, the rooms aligned, and the windows positioned to make sense with the furniture. Fluff it up, and you've got big trouble.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

The responsibility of an architect is to create a sense of order, a sense of place, a sense of relationship.

A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety , and Economy.

Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.

The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.

You build a player like you build a house. You start with the foundations. The fundamentals.

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

in architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies