Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.
The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.
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.
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
My architecture tends to be legible, light and flexible. You can read it. You look at a building, and you can see how it is constructed. I put the structure outside.
Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.
I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.
The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.
I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.
In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.
The tensions are always based on financial resources. Something like film is very problematic because it is viewed as an art form and also as an industry with a pure commercial base.
The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.
The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.
I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.
Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.
Women's art, political art - those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.
I wasn't trying to turn graffiti into an art form. I just wanted to learn about art. I wanted to learn this game.
