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New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it.
I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.
Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.
You start a project as a young person and then at the end you are another person. You are ready to go for your pension.
What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.
Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines.
The two most important functional aspects to be fulfilled in a transportation facility are ease of wayfinding and easy orientation.
The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.
The architect works for so many years building it, and the moment you deliver it to the people is the moment when you are unnecessary.
My goal is always to create something exceptional that enhances cities and enriches the lives of the people who live and work in them.
There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.
Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.
Like Grand Central Station, which is a marvelous building, the design and engineering of the Oculus will endure for many generations to come.
Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.
Airports need an identity, a main hall that defines the dignity of the space and allows people to move fluidly throughout its ancillary parts.
The architect is not only the director, but he is the composer. And, as a composer, the architect brings a sense of creativity to each building.
When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.
My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.
You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.
The function of arts centers goes far beyond being places for performance. They might not be explicitly religious, but they are civic and social spaces.
My closest partner and the person I have been working with for 35 years has been my wife. She not only supported me and helped me but also framed my life.
There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.
For people of the younger generation, the 21st century has started for them with a positive sign that Valencia is and will continue to be a very modern city.
Some have tried to use my work for politics, using inaccurate or out-of-context information that, repeated enough, becomes truth to some even though it is not.
I just want to build the best buildings. It's not about me, it's about the buildings, creating a space where society can gather and marvel in beauty and nature.
In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.
I think it is important to be present in the places where you are working. It is not only about doing a project, but following the project through its construction.
It is very important to visit the Oculus at a moment in which the skylight is open. Through the enormous 240′ x 20′ opening, we are framing a piece of Manhattan's sky.
Later works are better because it takes a lot of time in architecture to mature. And, it takes a lot of discipline to experience everything that is changing around you.
I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I've always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.
New York is not a place that lets you be indifferent. New York is this kind of place that, wherever you go, wherever you move, you are always confronted by your own time.
The architect holds much knowledge, but is not a specialist. Especially with the computer and technology, the amount of knowledge an architect possesses keeps on growing.
It's very atmospheric. It's not a building that is a severe statement in the skyline. We need the height; otherwise, the building almost disappears because it is so slender.
Actually, if you look at the works of the great architects of our time, you can see that their most beautiful works are always their later works - Kahn, Corbusier, even Gehry.
Valencia is a pure Mediterranean city; it is a city like Naples or Palermo, like Rome a little bit. Walking in the old town has a little bit of the flavor of the old city of Rome.
I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.
In my opinion, as an engineer, a bridge is the most difficult thing you can do. You are not working in the direction of gravity but against it - so the problem opposes the solution.
The way is not always easy, but in order to bring a work through to completion, you will need a strong character, a broad foundation of knowledge and an enormous force of persuasion.
Many architects say that they will never do a bridge. But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century.
A bridge is born of necessity, but it must establish its own identity. It should harmonize with its surroundings, and the design must transcend the purely local and transform the setting.
I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.
You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.
I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved.
I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music.
The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.
There is a change in the view about how condominiums are designed. People used to make prototype apartments and reproduce these boxes hundreds and even thousands of times, and then ask people to conform.
The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is for the community of San Francisco. And the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the most magnificent bridges ever built, is also a monument to the community, you see.
Bridges join places that were separated. They are built for the sake of progress and for the average citizen. They even have a religious dimension. Even the word 'religious' comes from the Latin, meaning 'creating a link.'
Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.