Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility.
We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.
If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.
Generally people are more impressed with the services and the comfort issues than the design.
It's not elitist to acknowledge that everyone has a unique signature and everyone is different.
People are searching for something they don't have in their lives. There's an unfulfilled need.
Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.
Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.
There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.
I am just relating to the world we live in. I see some order in it, even though it looks like mush.
I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.
I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.
Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen.
Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.
It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.
I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.
We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.
Computers allow architects to remain parental instead of being marginalized by the contractors and managers.
Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.
Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction.
You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.
I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.
This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off.
The architect Borromini's Quattro Fontane, a little church in Rome, is one of the most beautiful rooms in history.
Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.
As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what's comfortable, and we're afraid of the different. We're afraid of change.
Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.
My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.
Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad?
Cardboard is another material that's ubiquitous and everybody hates, yet when I made furniture with it everybody loved it.
Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.
Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.
Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.
Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.
My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.
Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.
If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the marketplace responds to the public's needs and desires.
We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.
I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.
Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.
You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.
Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
That's where you have to look for your inspiration. Don't separate the rest of your life - who you are, what you love - from your work.
I found the material that people hated the most and used the most. So, I was going and try and see if I could play with it sculpturally.
My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.
There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.
In Tokyo, London or Los Angeles people go into McDonald's and the restaurants are identical and people are comfortable. It's unthreatening.
Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.
Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.