I think architects are often at their best when faced with restraints.
All clients think that they are architects.
Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.
I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.
Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it’s designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it’s done by some of the world’s largest corporations.
Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.
I don’t think I have a signature style that announces, ‘This is a Safdie.’ But I think star architects have seized an opportunity to go anywhere in the world to produce meaningless buildings.
Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.
The magic was in the Marshall Plan itself. It provided an opportunity for appealing and constructive work. In a sense, the mission chiefs were given the opportunity to help act as architects for the new Europe that was envisioned.
When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days – museums have to bring in money – but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.
There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals – lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.
We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.
I think that designers and architects need to educate the people who don’t quite know what they do and make a strong case for why it’s valuable and why it changes the game. I think waiting for people to come around to it just won’t do.
Women are the real architects of society.
The Berlin of the ’20s formed the foundation of my future education… the Berlin of the UFA studios, of Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Erich Pommer. The Berlin of the architects Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. The Berlin of the painters Max Libermann, Grosz, Otto Dix, Klee and Kandinsky.
If architects weren’t arrogant, they wouldn’t be architects. I don’t know a modest good architect.
Many architects say that they will never do a bridge. But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century.
The architects of Brexit are a cocktail of lying racists and buffoons. I don’t think even someone as cynical as me could have predicted how deeply stupid these people are.
The difference between me and the newer artists is that I have the history with the architects, the masters that started the music. I know where the music came from.
In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran.
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.
I did a comparison of a school of architects known as the New York Five. I compared their articulation of wall surfaces, which I enjoyed very much.
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