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.
I was always really geeky about design and buildings. Always into architecture as a kid.
Today’s developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.
I’ve gone to school for business, for design, for architecture.
I don’t know why I’ve always been so captivated by architecture.
Architecture students are generally given theoretical projects, often located at distant locations, and told to come up with a design.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.
I think architecture has to be a gift.
Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.
There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.
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.
Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That’s really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape.
The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.
What makes architecture extraordinary is that you’re looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it’s seeing more than one part of the building at one time.
The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.
To me it was fascinating, the idea of going to university and studying a subject – architecture – that I had already faced in building some small houses.
I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.
It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.
I’ve never left China. My family’s been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I’m a western architect.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
You could spend your time with your nose buried in a guidebook, but Amsterdam really is best explored on foot, so you can stumble upon the city’s hidden gems. The architecture and the beauty of some of the buildings is also wonderful.
