I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.
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.
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.
In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.
Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?
The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.
The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.
I'd like to do a lot of things - whether in design or architecture or business.
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.
If you examine this, I think that you will find that it's the mechanics of Japanese architecture that have been thought of as the direct influence upon our architecture.
Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.
The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.
The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.
Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.
Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.
French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture like Roman design, it looks to the community.
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.
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.
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.
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.
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.
Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.
Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.
My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore.
In fact, it will be very easy to climb the building because of its shape and architecture.
Charles was very intent to use his years as Prince of Wales to make his mark while he still had freedom of maneuver that he wouldn't have as King. The first subject he really went for was architecture. It made an impact.
It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.
Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.