Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.
Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.
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.
What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.
What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.
I believe that self-discovery is an ongoing thing. I might not ever fully know who I am, but I also believe that I could be whoever I want, whenever I want.
If there really is no new way to be found, we are not afraid to stick with the old one that we found previously. So, I do not make every building different.
The Art of Seeing. It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean, to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.
For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design.
Publicity doesn't really get me anything. Clients are not going to hire me for a $100 million building because I have a brand. They really want the product.
We are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.
The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.
Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.
Ultimately it's the public nature of those projects that I most enjoy. Museums are more than just places to view art, they're also civic and social centers.
There is no magical solution because urban traffic congestion arises from the fact that a lot of people want to be in the same place at the same time often.
You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.
As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Googles traffic congestion maps.
From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.
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 liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.
In 1991, if someone came in with a $1 million budget for a boutique, I would have fainted. Nobody spent even half that. But now, the bar has risen very high.
To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.
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.
I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.
The expiatory church of La Sagrada FamÃlia is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.
I do not feel certain until I have confronted my initial solution with other solutions - although in fact the first solution often proves to be the right one.
The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems.
In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.
When I designed my loft, I literally framed the World Trade Center as a picture postcard I could see from my bed. I no longer have that image, and I mourn it.
As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps.
There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.
No rendering can really simulate the way the light bounces off the bronze panel. From some angles, it's almost a mirror, and from others it's a matte surface.
I didn't know I was Jewish until I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10, when my best friend told me I couldn't come to their house because I was a Jew.
Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.
Light has not just intensity, but also a vibration, which is capable of roughening a smooth material, of giving a three-dimensional quality to a flat surface.
One of the real challenges, since we're working in so many places - Mexico, Japan, Brazil - is understanding variations, both in terms of culture and context.
So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.
In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.
I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.
I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.
We regard those other cultures such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1000 or 2000 years ago - as "undeveloped".
We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.
When one deals with urban issues, one never deals with clear black-and-white issues; they're all trade-offs. Important urban issues present conflicting values.
We are limited only by our lack of creativity. Our buildings should symbolize the exuberance of a free nation that encourages individual effort and creativity.
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.
I understand that, today, some developers are asking architects to design eye-catching, iconic buildings. Fortunately, I've not had that kind of client so far.
But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.
Architecture is my work, and Ive spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.