I got a degree in architecture for the educational experience but in terms of career, everything is cinema.
I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future.
There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.
Shoe design is like architecture – with the finest structure and tight, precise seams, it suits my obsessive neatness.
A lasting architecture has to have roots.
I wanted to be a cartoonist, but there was no cartoon academy. So I enrolled in the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture. But then I really got smitten by architecture.
I have no requirements for a style of architecture.
The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.
The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend… they can all go drifting by unseen if you’re not careful.
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.
The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.
Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.
Architecture adds dimensions to my life that would be impossible to acquire if I retired. The beautiful thing about architecture is that every project is brand new. I am forced to renew myself with every project. Isn’t that wonderful?
A building is no good if someone’s got to explain to you why it’s good. You can’t say you don’t know enough about architecture – that’s ridiculous. It’s got to work on many levels.
The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming.
You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony.
