Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes
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Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. He will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time. An architect of ability should be able to tell a client what he wants. Most of the time a client never knows what he wants.
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Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.
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It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.
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The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
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God is in the details.
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The building art is man's spatial dialogue with his environment and demonstrates how he asserts himself therein and how he masters it.
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The office building is a building for work, organization, lucidity and economy. Light, spacious working rooms, clearly arranged, undivided, only organized according to the pattern of the firm.
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Generally, I think my work has so much influence because of its reasonableness.
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True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.
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The unformed is not worse than the over-formed. The former is nothing; the latter is mere appearance. Real form presupposes real life.
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After my time in Holland, an inner battle ensued in which I tried to free myself from the influence of Schinkelesque classicism.
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What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
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In 1912, when I was working in The Hague, I first saw a drawing by Louis Sullivan of one of his buildings. It interested me.
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Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.
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You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.
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Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children.
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I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that.
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First you have to learn to do something, then you can go out and do it.
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Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.
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I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.
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Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.
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A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
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It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.
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The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.