When I started designing in school, I discovered that I had a knack for it. I fell completely in love with architecture, and I remain in love with it.
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.
There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything – from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up – grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
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.
The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.
I was a rebel. I never wanted to build. We thought of architecture as intellectually bankrupt and slightly corrupt, and I was always more interested in other forms of discourse.
Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.
I don’t believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: ‘So what else is new?’
Architecture remains a passion and a subject I’m very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it.
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.
When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture.
Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.
That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I’ve paid homage to it many times in my drawings.
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
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.
I am involved in the architecture of space.
In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas.
The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.
The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.
Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.
