Architect Quotes

Now, the downside to conservation is that so much is done for the public, which almost always mars the environment that one wanted to conserve.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

Carrying out the thing, getting it to the point when one might say: There, now it is good - that point is hard to reach. Often, one sets very high goals for oneself. Perhaps too high.

Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it's not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it - a work of art.

The whole memorial is for different senses... seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. I probably would have come up with something different if I had not lived through it.

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act.

One of the things I thought a lot about was how can we get the views, for instance, the main plaza, you look up to Telegraph Hill from there and therefore it would be a disaster to close that view off.

One is, that they will feel about you that you're going to make something wonderful for them. And they help you by expressing themselves. Not telling you how to do it, but encouraging you and accepting your vision and working with you on that kind of a level.

Let me just say something that I forgot, I also hoped and this was very true in the beginning - that this would also be a place that people would be able to walk in to the fountain and use it in a nice way of reading and examining the quotations on the blocks.

I suppose and I hope that the young guys who are out there losing their lives at least feel the same way I did. I shouldn't think about this very much because I'm almost weeping when I think about it.

I always say to young people when they ask me how I work, I always say to them, the only time you've ever going to do something good is if you have a good client. And by good I mean all kinds of things.

Because the quality of living with nature and allowing it to manifest itself is different than the quality of living in a city, especially a dense city.

Because over and over again, the times that I've done really good things is because I've had a wonderful client of some kind, and a lot of it depended on me to induce them to be creative.

Because one of the benefits of getting older, I guess-there are very few benefits, really - most of them are a pain in the butt. People depend on me more; they believe in me more, they think I'm good.

And I think one of the tasks that I always feel is how to get that vision out of them. Not exactly what they want, but what they want to accomplish for themselves or their community or their family.

And you finally get to a consensus, where you get a sense of what really ought to be done, and then they give it to me and then I draw it. I mean draw it in the sense, the philosophical sense.

Of all the Jedis I saw in the film, Yoda's the only one I like.

Beware of over-confidence; especially in matters of structure.

It is only the young and callow and ignorant that admire rashness. Think before you speak. Know your subject.

Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.

There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

My buildings are all on budget.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

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.

I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

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 work from the inside out.