Architecture is art, nothing else.
Architecture has curled up in a ball and it’s about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you’re not sure if it’s good or bad but at least it’s interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.
I think about architecture all the time. That’s the problem. But I’ve always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there’s no reason for it to be. I don’t want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.
I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
One of my favorite vacation places is Miami, because of the people, the water and the beach – of course – and the architecture on Miami Beach is so wonderful.
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.
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.
All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.
I don’t know any architects that I respect who don’t have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.
The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.
Underwater, I experience space with my body. I’ll see a school of fish gathering and moving together and I’ll exclaim, ‘This is architecture.’
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
The ‘International Style of Modernism’ came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet.
Though I love the arts with all my heart – paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music – and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.
Architecture is a service business. 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’m a member of the National Trust. I absolutely love architecture, history, geography, the arts and culture. Oh, and I love gardens. I moved from London to Hertfordshire, so I could get a garden.
Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go… it’s just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available.
People wouldn’t know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them.
Architecture is by definition a very collaborative process.
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.
Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building.
You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they’d become architects. I’ve had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that’s normal.
I love architecture, but I learned early on that architects just don’t make a lot of money.
The future of architecture is culture.
I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.
Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.
Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.
I’ve never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.
If you’re into architecture and you’re from the West, everything is hors d’oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you’re led there. You can’t escape it.
When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn’t get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead.
I practised as an architect for 10 years. I qualified in 1973 with a fellowship diploma of architecture. World Series Cricket gave me the freedom to go out and pursue architecture.
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.
I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material – more of an environment, not a product.
Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.
Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.
Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.
It’s not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.
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.
To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.
When you have rules to abide by, does that curtail you as a designer, or set you free? People think of classical architecture visually, but I think the brilliant part of it is actually spatial.
Once I got out of architecture school I decided not to be an architect, I just started my own little design studio.
When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence.
If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.
When you are only one vendor, there is a very low rate of innovation. You think the old architecture is just fine, and it can just happily exist for many years.
Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky – we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.
Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.
Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.
Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.
It is good to learn from the ancients. I’m a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.
We’re always taught that we’re building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.
I had it drummed into me from an early age that personalizing everything was not a good thing. Besides, I don’t think that kind of commodity-driven system makes for the most productive architecture.
Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.
Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
