If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.
In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.
No matter what I've done, what I've tried to do, everybody says it can't be done. And it's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas.
And you finally get to a consensus, where you get a sense of what really ought to be done, and then they give it to me and then I draw it. I mean draw it in the sense, the philosophical sense.
Let me just say something that I forgot, I also hoped and this was very true in the beginning - that this would also be a place that people would be able to walk in to the fountain and use it in a nice way of reading and examining the quotations on t...
Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.
It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.
I have no choice but to fight them every step of the way. I can't tell you how many other stupid ideas have been proposed over the last two years.
No rendering can really simulate the way the light bounces off the bronze panel. From some angles, it's almost a mirror, and from others it's a matte surface.
If we can think about not the object, but the process of creating the object, in short, we have no constraints. We have processes in our hands that allow us to create structures at all scales that at one point we couldn't even have dreamed of.
We still have very little understanding of how we can tweak form or shape at the genetic level. We certainly haven't unlocked those secrets.
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.
Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.
Except for the projects in Israel, my being Israeli has contributed negatively to my global activity. It is hard for me, for example, to get projects in the Persian Gulf emirates.
If you look at the buildings, you'll find that one part looks as if it was designed by one man, and you go around and look at another facade and it looks as if it was designed by another man, you see.
I don't look so closely at women's fashion, but from the 20th century on, people have had the freedom to express themselves and their individualities, and fashion is one of the most fundamental ways in which they do this, men and women are equally ab...
But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done ma...
I don't have regrets of being an architect. You are looking continuously - to the leaves of the trees, the shapes of the cars, to the structures of the city, to the patterns of textiles - to find the reasons behind the forms. That is very rewarding. ...
I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.
I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?
The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means o...
