Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.
The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.
Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you're seventy or eighty, you're still beginning. So, that's the kind of life I've preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know.
Forms in nature are a byproduct of a reciprocal action between a given material and the conditions of the environment. But in architecture, the process is the direct opposite: First you decide on the form, and then you think how to build it in reality.
There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.
Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.
Unesco can rightly be claimed as one of Britain's greatest contributions to that global architecture of peace, and for Penny Mordaunt to be willing to destroy that legacy by withdrawing Britain's membership is nothing but historical and cultural vandalism.
Tuscany is so full of history and beauty - you meet wonders of art and architecture on almost every corner. But I love the region's homier aspects: the special sweetness of the tomatoes, the soft mozzarella, the heady scents of basil and garlic everywhere.
After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.
You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.
You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.
I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.
I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.
If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.
When you're in a creative flow with somebody - and I had this back in architecture school - you're just so passionate about what you're doing, and if that other person is just as passionate, you'll be madly in love with them. It's just that thrill of creating.
The bones of my architecture are very much related to the structure, to the physical fact of how a building can stand up; it's also related to geometry and a certain understanding of the architecture in which there is a balance between expression and function.
The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.
Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.
I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.
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.
If you have an architecture of control, let's say, where you select in advance everything that's going to affect your life, then you're going to live in a very small world that will have an echo chamber feature... Pandora, which I love, actually feeds into that.
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.
A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.
The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.
All of these technologies that we are putting together... our memory technology, our CPU, our graphics architecture, our GPUs - all that is being applied to where the data is. You can almost predict where Intel will be in the future. It will be where data resides.
I have a traditional view of the afterlife... heaven, hell and judgments. But the accounts of those places are scant, and I believe it's on purpose. We aren't supposed to try to figure out the architecture of the afterlife, since the big game is here in this life.
When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I'd move in and sell the previous one - so on and so forth.
About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.
The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development.
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.
First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture.
I was studying architecture at Berkeley when my father passed away in 2007. We knew he had cancer, but we didn't expect it to escalate so rapidly. In my mind, it was like, 'He'll pull through.' When he didn't, I didn't understand. I was 21, and my best friend had died.
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.
My guilty pleasure is I like to watch a lot of HGTV. I really like watching design shows about houses, like extreme homes. Like buying a bridge and turning it into a house or something like that. I really am interested in home design or something like that... architecture.
If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.
A pool at the edge of the ocean is the simplest geometry, yet you feel connected to the sea. In a forest with the mountains in the background, you also feel the connection to nature, yet it's a very complex geometry. I think architecture is about controlling these feelings.
We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of 'the use.' Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty.
Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.