Cheese was the staple. Bread you brought from home. The Schnaps came later. At the end of the week when people got paid, that's when you got your Schnaps, lots of it, five Pfennige a shot.
Nature, too, shall live its own life. We must beware not to disrupt it with the color of our houses and interior fittings. yet we should not attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity.
What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.
The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
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.
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
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.
Form as a goal always ends in formalism. For this striving is directed not towards an inside, but towards an outside. But only a living inside has a living outside.
Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
Most of our designs are developed long before there is a practical possibility of carrying them out. I do that on purpose and have done it all my life. I do it when I am interested in something.