How Words of Legendary Architects Live On

I was influenced by the architects I studied under who were in turn influenced by the architects they studied under. For example, I believe that architecture is at its best when all the unneeded elements are stripped away to reveal the fundamental essence of the design. In other words, "Less is more," which the great modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said. I learned this from my third-year studio professor, who used to work for Mies. My fourth-year professor would always ask us to discover "what the building wants to be," which is a phrase he learned from the great Louis Kahn, who he studied under at the University of Pennsylvania. Now I use this phrase once a week.

These are two facts I will mention to you within the first 10 minutes of our meeting because basically I studied under Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe, once removed.

That's how it works. It's like the telephone game. Vitruvius whispered something to Palladio hundreds of years ago, and Thomas Jefferson thought he heard what Vitruvius said but totally got it wrong, and leaned over to Christopher Wren to repeat it, but Christopher Wren was sketching a church dome on a napkin, which McMead and White stole and used for their designs at the White City in Chicago, and this greatly offended Louis Sullivan, so he went back to the office and fired Frank Lloyd Wright for stealing his clients. At least that's what Wright's student Kevin Bacon told my second-year professor, who told me this story, although I was sketching a church steeple on a napkin at the time, so I may have misunderstood him. This is how architecture works. It's a flawless system.

Here are a few of the phrases I learned from the architects I studied under, who tell me they learned them from the architects whom they studied under, who said them first. And they say architects are not good with words.