In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.
We seem to forget that innovation doesn't just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.
I am finally getting the chance to build large structures and break preconceptions that my designs are just sculptures for people to be in. But my work always comes down to the human scale.
Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.
I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.
I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it... the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me, I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality.
When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.
I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.
The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.
The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.
But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.
I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.
I think the younger generation, the people poised to dominate the workforce, are more socially conscious. They are more demanding in terms of environment and how that environment contributes to their life.
The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.
At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture.
Reducing caloric intake is the only proven method of extending life. If caloric intake is reduced to 20 percent below maintenance, you can extend your lifespan considerably.
I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life.
We're not trying to make us live forever; we're not trying to even make us live significantly longer. What we're trying to do is extend the period of healthy life.
'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
