Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We have a thousand hydrangea plants bordering the house, and they were all supposed to be pink, but a handful of them keep turning purple.
I derive a tremendous amount of pride in developing places that everyday people can experience. I like to create beauty in everyday lives.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Everyone has the perfect gift to give the world-and if each of us is freed up to give our unique gift, the world will be in total harmony.
If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.
I was in Taiwan recently and was completely amazed by the density of population. It makes New York look like no one is out on the streets.
I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.
Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.
When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building.
Nothing old is ever reborn, but neither does it totally disappear. And that which has once been [born], will always reappear in a new form.
Half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.
We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.
I was born in Argentina, June 13, 1943. I brought up my parents very well, so they let me come to America to study at Princeton University.
Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings.
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.
Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.
Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.
A Not So Big House feels more spacious than many of its oversized neighbors because it is space with substance, all of it in use every day.
New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.
The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.
Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.
I had the idea to become really emotionally detached, and a lot of the time I've treated people that I've cared about a lot really unfairly.
The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.
I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.
Unchallenged, opinions became respected precedent then exceptionless concepts and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.
Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.
If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality.
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.
My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.
The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.
I grow dizzy when I recall that the number of manufactured tanks seems to have been more important to me than the vanished victims of racism.
We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.
I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary.
The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.
Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it.
I'm a little more measured. That sense of urgency I thought accompanied things - it can take a little longer. You have to take the long view.
I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
I've benefited enormously from an arts education and a music education in New York. When they cut the programs for funding, I was devastated.
African Americans were responsible for creating a lot of this beautiful and elaborate ironwork; we weren't just working in the cotton fields.
I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.
Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.
Like Grand Central Station, which is a marvelous building, the design and engineering of the Oculus will endure for many generations to come.
Underwater, I experience space with my body. I'll see a school of fish gathering and moving together and I'll exclaim, 'This is architecture.'
Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.
Love is the virtue of the Heart, Sincerity is the virtue of the Mind, Decision is the virtue of the Will, Courage is the virtue of the Spirit.
'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.