Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.
You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in.
The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.
When you do what I do, there are a lot of institutions that give you awards. I've gotten maybe 20 medals. They're glorious, and there's a spirit behind them. But sometimes they give you this dreadful modern glass thing. I wish everyone could afford a loving cup.
I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.
For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects.
Too many architects are just trying to make all of their buildings look like a brand, and that may be good for business, but that is terrible for the cities because they lose character. If I go to Paris, I go to see the beauty of Paris and the coherence of Paris.
There is a need in every generation to study the past, to absorb its spirit, to preserve its messages...it's a collaboration of ourselves and our ancestors, the result is a deeper understanding for individuals and in consequence, a broader culture for the nation.
Greed in human nature may now come near to enslaving all humanity by means of the Machine - so fast and far has progress gone with it. This will be evident to anyone who stops to study the modern mechanistic Moloch and takes time to view it in its larger aspects.
Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature. Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much.
Sometimes the media gives us the impression that we are terminal patients, because of problems of global warmth or the ozone layer. And the people, they don't understand that they can could change this situation for the better if they could act locally in a city.
And just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, just as we must understand functions, so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.
Let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive building methods, where there was meaning in every stroke of an axe, expression in every bite of chisel.
Artificial light is used because you can control it better. Technically, it is more homogeneous, more delicate, and less damaging to artwork. But I think it's interesting when the visitor can see variations in the light, when it is not only technical or suitable.
If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities.
...there is no doubt something will be done sooner or later to enable us to put on a house every day, just as we put on clothes or choose a book to read or a theater to go to, like choosing a day to be lived, within the limits grated by other destinies or chances.
In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in the least time.
What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.
There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.
I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.
So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.
When women do succeed, the press, even the industry press, spend far too much time talking about how we dress, what shoes we're wearing, who we're meant to be seeing. That's pretty sad for women, especially when it's written by women who really should know better.
For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity.
I grew up in an apartment my whole life. It was just me, my mom, and my brother - she supported us. And we've always liked driving through rich neighborhoods, especially around Christmas. We would always admire the wealth. I always had this strange feeling with it.
1926 was the most significant year. Looking back, it seems that it was not just a year in the sense of time. It was a year of great realisation or awareness. It seems to me that at certain times of the history of man, the understanding of certain situations ripens.
How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.
Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.
Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of water drops in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear becomes a cavity sculpted in the interior of the mind.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.
We have big, big problems - flooding, earthquake, and many foolish things which now people are doing - I mean, these self-made catastrophes. We are able to give to every man on the street the possibilities to help himself. And to fight for this was one of my duties.
It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.
When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives. To express spirituality, the architect has to think of the original material of architecture, space and light.
Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.
When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.
It's a good marriage because each of us is what we are, allows the other one to be themselves, and appreciates each other for the right reason. You know, it's rare that you'll find two people who don't try to change the other person and let everyone be what they are.
I think to take your shirt off, you need to have a great body and more than that, confidence and attitude. It's all related. A great body equals confidence, and confidence equals attitude. And when you put all three together, you get a Salman Khan! And that's not me.
Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely?
If you just live in New York and you only know New York, you know a certain kind of condition of formality and informality. By being able to go to another context and to be able to use that as a counter foil to the context you know, you are about to see a wider range.
When I began designing machines I also began to think that these objects, which sit next to each other and around people, can influence not only physical conditions but also emotions. They can touch the nerves, the blood, the muscles, the eyes and the moods of people.
Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.
There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.
The architect is very interesting because the architect is the commander, meaning the one who commands all the workers. The architect is also the music director and composer. He cannot play each instrument, but he needs to understand and embody the sense of each part.
There is a strong reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious design visions encourage the continuing development of the new digital technologies and fabrication techniques, and those new developments in turn inspire us to push the design envelope ever further.
We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process. Precisely, this shows whether the form was discovered by starting from life, or for its own sake. That is why I consider the creative process so essential. Life for us is the decisive factor.
What I want to do is try to raise the level of SCI-Arc's original mission, which was to be forward-thinking. And let's face it, if you're forward-thinking and you're dealing in concepts of new ideas, history has told us that new ideas are not always wanted by everyone.
I have built already seven very large railway stations: one in Italy; two in Belgium; and in France, and in Switzerland, in Portugal, and also in the United States. And what happens is that stations are not things that come from one day to another, it takes many years.
Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.
We've taken on health care in a big way in our office, ever since nine years ago when I was paralyzed. I was in eight different hospitals, three different rehab centers, and all the rooms were dreadful. As an architect, designer, and patient, I can do something to help.
The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can... and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.