Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.
The safety requirements, which are necessary, spread everything out and push people farther and farther away from the stage and from each other.
That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.
In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.
The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.
I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building.
I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.
I'm preprogrammed emotionally and intellectually not to go down blind alleys. I don't waste the time. I automatically edit out whatever's impractical.
When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.
It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.
Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.
There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.
I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything - the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.
You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.
Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.
The whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.
On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.
I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going.
When you agree to collaborate, you agree to jump off a cliff holding hands with everyone, hoping the resourcefulness of each will insure that you all land on your feet.
In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.
Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
Just because you are an architect and make decent buildings does not mean that you can suddenly become a set designer for one of the best avant-garde dancers in the world.
I'm of two minds about doing any interviews these days. It seems a lot of the world is out to play gotcha with me. I guess they always go after people these days. It's sport.
Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction. Everybody’s an artist. Unfortunately we don’t treat them as such.
When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies.
Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.
Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore.
The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited.
Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.I'm not dismissing it.
China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.
Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.
Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.
The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.
You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.
Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.
Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.
We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.
It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.
Here we are surrounded by material that's being manufactured in unimaginable quantities worldwide and is used everywhere. I don't like it, no one likes it, and yet it's pervasive. We don't even see it.
People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.
A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.
We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me."
When you were a kid, if you went to the Montreal Forum or a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens, which I did, there was a great feeling. The new stadiums don't have it. Why don't they have it? Building codes.
It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.
Everything - design and technology and materials - has changed since the World Trade Center was built. A lot of it has to do with computers, which allow us to be far more efficient as well as structurally sound.
That's what you have to find in architecture. You have to find your signature. When you find it, you're the only expert on it. People can say they like it or don't like it. They can argue about it, but it's yours.
I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten.
The rap on me on the street is the opposite - I'm impractical, I'm more expensive, it's too complicated and I run over budgets, which isn't true. None of that's true and there's plenty of documentation if anybody needs it.
I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.