I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.
A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body.
In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.
Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.
I need quite a lot going on, so a perfect holiday for me is one in a cooler climate with wonderful scenery, animals or great architecture.
The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.
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.
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.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background’s completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one’s life, and I can’t say that the Chineseness in me is not there.
Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago – at least over 30 years ago – to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.
Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.
Mies van der Rohe’s architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.
My architecture is very much place-related.
In Zagreb, the Old Town really could be Prague. You go two hours to the coast to Opatija, and you really could be in the South of France, in the Croatian Riviera. And then you head down the coast towards Split, and you get into more Turkish architecture, so you can double Istanbul.
Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
The U.K. has been at the forefront of developing the climate change policy architecture that can ensure climate action is integrated into economic decision making.
Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.
When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist’s life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.
In the 1950s, my family first lived in West Los Angeles. Dad was studying architecture at USC and we didn’t have a lot of money. He’d buy crumbling fixer-uppers, make repairs and sell them for a small profit. Then we’d move on. My early childhood image of him is standing on a ladder and sanding the front door.
I grew up in Romania studying art and architecture.
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry’s very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.
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.
Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It’s like a skin or a skull, but you don’t know what’s inside.
I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.
Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people’s lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.
In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.
I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.
I always look forward to the next project. That is one of the wonderful things about architecture – you always can hope for another project to design.
What people want, above all, is order.
I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
A lasting architecture has to have roots.
In 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, Western countries took it as an isolated incident, but probably this was the start of the push against our underlying international security architecture. And this push then started a landslide which in 2014 resulted in Crimean occupation.
I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
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.
Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.
I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It’s basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.
I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
I would like to attend college in the future when I have time. I have always been interested in architecture, so perhaps I would pursue a degree in that or business.
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.
The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.
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.
‘Station to Station’ came out of a sense of urgency – a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.
