The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it-whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night.

Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.