Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis.
Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.
I don't know why I've always been so captivated by architecture.
I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.
To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.
What's fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it's crap-looking - apart from the White House, which is beautiful.
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.
Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.
We have to base architecture on the environment.
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
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.
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.
Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.
I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.
Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.
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.
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 got into this little habit of architecture and building. I designed a house in Colorado and one in Hawaii. The idea is supposed to be build and sell - but then I can never bring myself to sell them.
The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
