My buildings should have an emotional core – a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.
Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art.
A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.
The Tigris is so fierce and rapid, and swallows its alluvial banks so greedily, that it is probable that some of the buildings described by the Hebrew traveller Benjamin of Tudela as existing in the twelfth century were long since carried away.
With Mtn Dew Game Fuel, I’m flying off buildings and hitting 360 snipes with more precision than ever.
If there were a major earthquake in Los Angeles, with bridges and highways and railroads and airports all shut down and huge buildings collapsing, I don’t care how much planning you do, the first 72 hours is going to be chaotic.
Recycling old buildings to show art is very important.
I don’t like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can’t see in buildings and cars.
I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model?
My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.
My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes… I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.
The truth is I don’t really know where my own interest in tall buildings really comes from. It cannot come from my hometown because there were no tall buildings there!
Buildings are ‘humane’ only when they promote peaceful human co-existence.
I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.
I love buildings that aren’t purpose-built.
The box got bigger, the outside, the buildings. And all that we were doing. I had to raise about $1 million every two days just to stay alive.
If you Google St Petersburg, it shows you some amazing buildings. When you go there, you realise that there are a lot of grey depressing ones that aren’t on Google.
New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it’s just one – a really rich one – with big tall glass buildings.
The horrific damage of 9/11 did not end when those buildings came down.
The thing that surprised me the most is just how much money women that weren’t rich were paying for their hair. When you’re in a beauty parlor in Harlem next to abandoned buildings and somebody’s paying five grand for a weave, that’s a bit much.
Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it’s incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past – not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains – objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.
Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders’ spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.
In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.
Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I’ve used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 – things died out, or there were plagues, the roads don’t lead there, whatever.
In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society.
With buildering, I get to keep that element of danger. Plus, I very much like the feeling of height, and buildings have even more of a feeling of height than rock faces.
For me, I guess I’m the acting equivalent of somebody that jumps off buildings and parachutes.
It’s such a great city, visually. You can’t get that kind of look in Canada that you can get in Boston: the old-brick historical buildings, the winding streets, the old but funky neighborhoods like Southie and Somerville. You can’t get that elsewhere. It’s a very unique place in that way.
The Crystal Cathedral Ministries, the assets and the buildings, would still be in the hands of the ministries if my father would have simply walked away. When I accepted the role as the next senior pastor, he had agreed to be an ambassador-at-large and raise funds for the endowment fund. He didn’t do that.
I don’t like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don’t appear any different from those in the past.
Los Angeles is a city of few hard targets. Its iconic buildings are private spaces, mostly residential, visible by invitation only or in the pages of a Taschen book. Its central industry is as mirage-like as the projection of light on a screen.
For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a ’round the clock’ community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.
We’re seeing the development of tactics in Iraq, such as suicide bombing. Insurgents have been driving cars with explosives into hotels and office buildings. The recruitment may be even more prolific outside Iraq.
New York’s buildings must be cleaner and more energy-efficient.
I’m a bad customer for my own buildings! If I’m choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!
Many of our buildings have large format murals that are of varying subject matter, and we’ve found that those are the sort of things that make people stop, digest, and absorb.
In the name of ‘mutual assistance,’ the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.
If you look at the buildings, you’ll find that one part looks as if it was designed by one man, and you go around and look at another facade and it looks as if it was designed by another man, you see.
I think that in a weird way, as technology gets more sophisticated, people have become less aware of it. It’s become part of our day to day life. We’re seeing large-scale projection mapping, like on buildings. There’s video everywhere. It’s much less noticeable that we’re actually looking at technology.
If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our emissions, you would at least see some signs. Not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, and whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. You would see some restrictions. But no. And no one talks about it.
I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.
I’ve seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I’ve seen beautiful art in museums. I’ve seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.
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.
Ultimately, the naming of buildings is not a mechanism by which history is kept alive. It is a mechanism by which the rich and the powerful are honoured.
The sort of lifetime achievement stuff that I’m getting now is kind of like Tom Sawyer’s funeral because they all know I’m sick. I am getting buildings named after me and awards and stuff.
We were already, in 1981, bemoaning the fact that people were using certain accessorised ideas and images that they connected with us – sort of strange buildings and neo-fascist regimes and the ‘dark side’ of human culture.
I don’t see Republicans flipping their lids trying to burn down buildings in Ninja outfits when a Democrat, progressive, or socialist tries to speak.
We have been developing an ever closer relationship with China on climate change for many years which has led to collaboration on carbon trading, offshore wind development, on low-carbon buildings, on nuclear energy, and on carbon capture and storage – to name just some of the ways in which we’re working together.
One of the things I’ve always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings.
For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation.
Japan’s humid and warm summer climate, as well as frequent earthquakes resulted in lightweight timber buildings raised off the ground that are resistant to earth tremors.
