I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'
Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.
In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.
Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.
Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.
Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.
I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.
I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.
Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.
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.
I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.
As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.
What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.
The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.
At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.
The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.
Like medicine (architecture) must move from the curative to the preventive.
I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany.
If you were a son of mine, I wouldn't want you to be an architect, because it's a tough way to be in the world.
I don't know how to use appliances. I mean, I use the coffee maker. But that's it.
For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.
