Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Architect Quotations

I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only this architecture creates.

Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative.

The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.

Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.

Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names.

Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children.

But what if we are dealing with fools?

Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms.

Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet

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.

Architecture is always the will of the age conceived as space - nothing else. Until this simple truth is clearly recognized, the struggle over the foundation of a new architecture confident in its aims and powerful in its impact cannot be realized; until then, it is destined to remain a chaos of uncoordinated forces.

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.