Muscat itself is a mixture of impersonal modern buildings, shopping malls, mosques, traditional souks, tarmac and sand.
The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses – clear as day.
Growing up in New York, there are a lot of tenement buildings and a lot of projects. You don’t leave your projects too much. The laundry’s there. The grocery store is there. Everything takes place right there. When I got knowledge of myself and thought about moving around the city, hip-hop was something that helped me.
On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.
There are so many constraints on the architect that public buildings almost never feel free or enjoyable.
I love New York, it’s always been my home. It has everything – music, fashion, entertainment, impressive buildings, huge parks, street cafes. And it’s very international, with people from all over the world.
Apart from differentiating our spaces with design, we also look for buildings that have distinctive character. We make sure every seat is a good one.
True leaders don’t invest in buildings. Jesus never built a building. They invest in people. Why? Because success without a successor is failure. So your legacy should not be in buildings, programs, or projects; your legacy must be in people.
I have the same sense of discovery and exhilaration from objects of design and everyday use – I am inspired by the buildings in my city, by park greenery and dazzling store windows, by the jaunty strollers and umbrellas and billboards I walk past. Just strolling our streets, we encounter creativity every single day.
When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, ‘Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?’ Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.
The artistic part of us all – I think that the easiest way to appreciate this – is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.
I’m really into architecture, I’m a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I’m a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.
One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.
For thousands of years, the most physically imposing buildings on earth were temples, churches, and mosques. But in the 20th century, new houses of worship came to dominate the landscape. Yankee Stadium is the most storied of these contemporary shrines.
In New York, you have thousands of buildings that have never been renovated, that have horrible designs, that are really cramped and terrible.
Here in Barcelona, it’s the architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic who are the objects of admiration – not a bunch of half-witted monarchs.
I don’t mind being a symbol but I don’t want to become a monument. There are monuments all over the Parliament Buildings and I’ve seen what the pigeons do to them.
Why are video games so violent? The ones I’ve seen remind me of the 4th of July, with everything exploding, buildings, cars, airplanes, men and women. Kill, kill, and kill for sport and entertainment.
I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.
And what are we going to leave for future generations? Are we going to leave them only buildings, cars? Or are we going to create more empathetic, more diverse societies more open to diversity?
As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North – that’s our highway – there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I’d be like, that’s what my house is going to look like when I get older. I’m going to start making my house look like this.
Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don’t quite fit the bill. They don’t march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our streets of crime.
For me, riding a two-wheeler bike was very risky. Counting the pedal strokes before turning a corner and learning to hear the sounds coming from buildings, grass and the climbing frame made all the difference to basic survival and ensured that I didn’t end up head-first in the sandpit.
What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.
My father is an architect, so I often think like a designer or an architect. I remember when I was admiring buildings, I would look up at them and see this perspective and this awesome power of the monument in front of me.
In China, we had some buildings that looked like the White House or wine bottles. All they seemed to represent was bad taste.
I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
I grew up in Beijing, and there weren’t many modern buildings during my childhood. I was influenced by traditional culture – the courtyards, the hutongs, the old city, and all the art forms – so, very naturally, I brought this to my practice.
Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality… Buildings were judged – at least by members of our own profession – more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
I would not be at all surprised to find out… that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess.
Startups are now creating specialized 3-D printers capable of producing everything from synthetic hamburgers to multi-story apartment buildings.
Me and my mates go free running all the time. It’s not my mum’s favourite sport. I’ve probably jumped four metres on to grass and two metres between buildings. It’s nothing like you see on the Internet, with guys jumping off skyscrapers, but it’s fun.
Liberals want to amend our country’s history to eradicate the role of Christianity in America and chisel references to God or faith from our historical buildings.
I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people – super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn’t love the stuff buildings are made from.
When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban – not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it’s all city and big buildings. But now that I’m here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.
Academies can also flog off land and buildings, if the much weakened local authorities agree. Serious money can be made, management salaries are high, and hidden in all this is the long-term public subsidy in such sites.
Theatre is about people, not buildings. Incalculable damage has been done to the expert talent a company needs – from wardrobe to lighting technicians.
The public brings our buildings to life, and we try to choreograph a lot of things, but our most successful work functions in unanticipated ways. Like the Blur Building. When little kids got in there, they cried or laughed or ran around. And no matter how much theory we put on top of it, it didn’t matter: it worked.
I’m very interested in buildings that have meaning for a particular place. I suppose it feels slightly rude to me if the imposed style that lands in a place is almost stronger than the place. For me it’s about inventing a solution for each place; if people then want to know who did it, then great.
I base jumped off one of the highest buildings in the world.
Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.
We build buildings which are terribly restless. And buildings don’t go anywhere. They shouldn’t be restless.
I should just drive around this city and take photos of all the buildings I’ve been humiliated in.
The Shark Tank was one of the best buildings to play in, and we had a lot of memories there.
It’s not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots.
We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
