Architectural Unity Quotes

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs.

A bridge is born of necessity, but it must establish its own identity. It should harmonize with its surroundings, and the design must transcend the purely local and transform the setting.

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit . . .

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.

Writing generally, it may be said that in design, roof, and general aspect, Japanese Buddhist temples are all alike. The sacred architectural idea expresses itself in nearly the same form always.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building.

If you look at the buildings, you'll find that one part looks as if it was designed by one man, and you go around and look at another facade and it looks as if it was designed by another man, you see.

Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. Everything else is not architecture, but a criminal act which has taken on form.