In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.
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.
The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.
Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.
Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.
As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.
When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right.
The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with pas...
People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges...
Being on the run wasn't fun, but it was something I had to do. I was actually working in legitimate jobs. I wasn't living on people's credit cards. I was living like a character out of a movie. It was performance art.
I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.
I think it was my mom's attitude about art and being part of the narcissistic digital generation or whatever that made me think anyone would care what I had to say about anything!
On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, it is some consolation that the man most responsible for that terrible morning will not be smiling smugly to himself as satellite TV brings to the leafy boulevards of Abbottabad the somber images of New Yorkers commem...
Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
