There are so many constraints on the architect that public buildings almost never feel free or enjoyable.
I was born during the war, on October 20, 1942, as the second of five children. My father, Rolf Volhard, was an architect.
I think creating of any sort, whatever line you’re in, is paramount – you can be an architect, you can be a banker, you can be anything – I think that when you create, you’re closest to God and yourself.
All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it’s difficult to quantify the attachment.
Unfortunately, we are not painters and authors, where we can do something in isolation. We require a lot of money to create what we create. It’s almost like being an architect: You can’t be an architect and build whatever buildings you want to.
When I was 15, we settled in Santa Monica, in a beige suburban ranch house. By then, my father, Ray, was an architect at Welton Becket’s firm. He was handy with a pencil and pen. His figurative drawings were very good, and his talent was intimidating.
As an architect, I learned to think and express myself on flat forms, on paper, and to imagine the contour of the lines of a design.
When I left Washington, we actually had a balanced budget and we paid down the most amount of the national debt in modern history and cut taxes and created jobs. And I was the chief architect of that plan in ’97.
My main profession is architect.
I worked with my dad for 15 years. I apprenticed under him and decided I wanted to become an architect. So I went to college for it and then the acting bug got me.
When I started out, nearly every architect I knew was working in public practice; that’s where the radical thinking was done. But, there’s always a danger of looking back as our fathers did and saying, ‘Things were better then.’
The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
I’m an architect. Before you start pouring the concrete, you build a foundation that is solid so that when you take the scaffolding down, it holds – forever. So that when junior high schools are doing ‘Hunchback,’ a 12-year-old as Frollo still works on some level.
I actually wanted to be an architect when I was a kid, but I did a solid geometry course where we had to build a geodesic dome out of toothpicks, and mine came out looking like an alien space station. I threw it against a wall and gave up.
I come from a long line of architects. I’m the only one who did not become an architect, but I’ve been around the drawing aspect and construction my whole life.
That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything – people want to be appreciated for what they have done.
As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored ‘Dortmunder’ novels, I wrote, ‘His natural ability to observe human behavior and to follow an idea, no matter how bizarre, through to its proper, rightful finish echoed the vision of an architect.’
One thing I learn – I’ve been in practice now for half a century or more, and the most important ingredient for an architect to do a good building is to have a good client. I think a client counts for as much as fifty per cent.
My parents were both writers – they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford – so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.
When you get an invitation to come back and be part of the team that will be the architect of the next generation of growth, when you get an opportunity in a business of the size and scope of McDonald’s, that’s incredibly attractive.
The team I have to work with at Loewe is incredible, from the architect to the archivist.
It’s often said that if doing something was easy, everyone would be doing it. I think that’s particularly true when you’re trying to make your mark or architect your own career. There’s often not a path to follow.
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.
Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.
The architect must be a prophet… a prophet in the true sense of the term… if he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.
If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.
I am a failed architect, if I’m honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I’ve got really bad spatial awareness.
If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect’s task – his most difficult task – is always that of selecting.
A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We create vessels in which life happens.
In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
I would have loved to have been an architect – which, actually, would have been a disaster.
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.
You should just enjoy it, but as soon as you decide that it is going to be your career, no matter whether you want to be a doctor or an architect or anything else, you need to work 5 hours a day.
I’m not a fashion architect. I don’t dress in Ralph Lauren and Gucci. When I buy a suit, I buy it at J. Press. I have a blue blazer that I wear 80 percent of the time.
Who I am as an architect and the history of my work – that’s clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.
There can be little question that the tall building presents one of the most difficult challenges to the architect.
Your life will be no better than the plans you make and the action you take. You are the architect and builder of your own life, fortune, destiny.
I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can’t do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.
I am going, if I can, to be an architect, and I am too old already, and there is no time to lose.
With a painter or a sculptor, one cannot begin to alter his works, but an architect has to put up with anything, because he makes utility objects – the building is there to be used, and times change.
I’d never known of an architect as a young man. I think there was only one architect in Tucuman.
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art – or at least people call it that.
I think there is a failure in foreign policy. And you have to acknowledge that under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the architect of that foreign policy. Whether it was malevolent or not, I don’t know.
It’s most satisfying to have an effect on the public realm – deep down I think it’s what every architect wants to do.
My dad was not happy about my not becoming an architect like him.
My dad’s an architect and my mom owned a French bakery for twelve years.
My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city.
From when I was about seven, I thought I wanted to be an architect. I’ve always loved spaces and dwellings in general.
One of the things I think about as I’ve evolved as an architect is, ‘Where do the poetic impulses come from?’
As many an architect will tell you, human behavior changes according to the environment.
I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn’t going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It’s been really fun.
So if you’re a customer today, the same person who came in to demonstrate the technology for you and helped you architect the solution before you bought it is likely going to be leading the team to help you do the implementation.
I’m working on a school of architecture in China. It’s rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I’m so pleased that they asked me.
