Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We need architects to be visionaries.
Architects think that beauty is a crime.
I'm trying to express nature in big cities.
The world itself is already a great textbook.
I actually feel like a very traditional architect.
Architects like to work in a problematic environment.
People can live in nature, and they won't necessarily destroy it.
I don't use tools to create things, but I use them to realize things.
Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.
The way a human can coexist with nature has to be at the spiritual level.
We need to be brave and tell the politicians what a better future could be.
I'm trying to create architecture as landscape. But I'm not copying nature.
Historically, sci-fi movies have played an important role in inspiring young people.
Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.
We need to enter a new era to make nature and humans more emotionally connected in modern cities.
Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.
Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.
I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material - more of an environment, not a product.
When we talk about a city, we need to talk about what the future is. Whats the ideal scenario in the future?
The way we do our architecture is to show that we can come up with our own solutions. We don't just take orders.
The shan-shui city idea is trying to bring traditional values and ways of living to modern high-rise architecture.
I think where traditional values are concerned, Chinese people see nature as very symbolic. It's a form of culture.
A door handle is very symbolic to me. It is the first object that one will interact with before entering a new space.
People think that buildings are permanent, but in China, this isn't true; we can always demolish and remake it better.
In China, we had some buildings that looked like the White House or wine bottles. All they seemed to represent was bad taste.
There must be a way to combine the high rise and high-density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky.
The architecture scene in China is the most open and free climate compared to many other places. You can find many opportunities.
We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.
If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.
Sometimes I sketch and then scan my sketch directly to make the curves more freehand. I don't want to make perfect industrial curves.
If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.
People love to go closer to nature and other people, so we need to create environments that let people have these emotional connections.
Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate.
I don't like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don't appear any different from those in the past.
When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture.
Instead of making grand structures and beautiful buildings, we should focus on the environment and the urban space and how you encourage people to live.
I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.
Tiananmen Square is a sensitive topic because many things happened there. The idea of turning the plaza into a forest makes many people feel uncomfortable.
Chinese people need to be aware of their present and ask, 'What's our culture? What can we bring to the world?' I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning - not only as a landscape but a part of daily life.
China is a place where you can experience two very contrasting things coexisting. First, the rich, cultural history of the country - and, second, rapid urbanization.
What if we treat the high-rise like a mountain, or we have gardens in the sky, or waterfalls? I think that's the most challenging thing I want to try in my architecture.
The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.
Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape.
Oscar Niemeyer really inspired me. He's from South America, where nature has meaning. And his architecture was not expensive or high tech but artistic and spiritual. I like that.
In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That's what today's architecture community should be.
Traditionally, in the Eastern World, man and nature are close: men find happiness and prosperity in the beauty of nature, even if the nature is actually built to match this very need.
'Shan shui' you can literally translate as 'mountain and water.' In traditional Chinese culture, there are a lot of paintings about shan shui, but now we're talking about a shan-shui city.
I would say that many architects are very logical. They start their process from analysis and from rational processes to try and find the 'right' answer, like solving a mathematic equation.
When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn't get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead.