Arne Jacobsen Quotes

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

I feel that all good art is powerful and simple.

Form follows beauty.

I like to aestheticize every possible thing that can be aestheticized.

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

I've come to believe in the primacy of form - the notion of art seducing you through your senses, through your eyeballs.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance, form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.