Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.
We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.
In almost every task involving form, there are dozens, often hundreds of contradictory elements, which need to be forced to work in harmony by man's will. This harmony can be acheived only through art.
We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time.
Im particularly interested in the public role that all buildings play. I believe that we architects should try to go beyond our basic obligations to the public, and our opportunities to do so are many.
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.
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.
I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values.
So I think that, yes, anything that makes it more palatable and easier to understand, such as a Virtual Centre, has to be seen as a primary activity within the educational and information global state.
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.
Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.
We are not peddlers of the fashionable. We believe that good design defies fashion, is truly innovative, eminently sensible, yet a source of inspiration to those who have the pleasure of living with it.
Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.
I'm particularly interested in the public role that all buildings play. I believe that we architects should try to go beyond our basic obligations to the public, and our opportunities to do so are many.
After years of touring, my voice has gotten a lot stronger. I used to just blow out after two or three shows, so I've definitely trained my voice, because I can now hit notes that I couldn't hit before.
In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.
The individual can take initiatives without anybody's permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.
There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.
The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.
And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.
We live in a world where great incompatibles co-exist: the human scale and the superhuman scale, stability and mobility, permanence and change, identity and anonymity, comprehensibility and universality.
Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.
Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerati ng system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.
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.
I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.
When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.
In town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.
Architects, sculptors painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a 'profession.' There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman.
In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.
My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
I have always dreamt of becoming an artist, and I have always pursued that dream. But I’ve had to realize, that I wouldn’t make it as a painter, a sculptor or a musician. I have tried, but only in private
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.
Happiness and depression cannot blossom on the same vine. Some people affirm their woes and beg for sympathy. Others, unfortunately, cast gloom wherever they go. These poor souls were born sick and tired.
The Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio comes from afar. Our land has a millennial history of emigrations: master masons, architects, builders, decorators, plasterers, artists from the world of building.
Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole - a whole which can be identified by everyone who is part of it.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
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."
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.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.
I think the younger generation, the people poised to dominate the workforce, are more socially conscious. They are more demanding in terms of environment and how that environment contributes to their life.
The task of the architect is to encompass everything about the site, starting from the concrete conditions and the sensory impressions created by those, to memories of the place, through empathy to vision.
Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.
My whole success is I've always been designing for people, first because I wanted to sell them merchandise. Then when I got into hotels, I had to rethink, what am I selling now? You're selling a good time.
Control is the wrong word. The practice is very much about sharing, and, in any creative practice, some individuals, whether partners or directors, are much closer to certain projects than I could ever be.
It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.
It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.
Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.