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Quotes by Architect

"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light."

"In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture."

"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."

"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."

"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."

"My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process."

"Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise."

"Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being."

"The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved."

"The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event."

"It's a fantastic responsibility and a wonderful moment."

"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity."

"Everyone has the right to walk from one end of the city to the other in secure and beautiful spaces. Everybody has the right to go by public transport. Everybody has the right to an unhampered view down their street, not full of railings, signs and rubbish."

"Furniture manufacturing in plastics requires very costly machinery, which the Danish market is not big enough to justify. Or so they say. But show me a plastics manufacturer who dares to take on the experiment."

"All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."

"All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space."

"If you live in a squalid environment, then of course you are going to want to get out of it, you are probably going to want to get into the country, because that's what it does."

"It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way."

"Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture."


"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."

"A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive."

"The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture."

"The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail."

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."

"The photographs were never about me. They were always about the people who were laying their lives on the line for basic civil rights. I look back and I can't believe there was ever a time in this country when ANY citizen could not vote. The times were appalling."

"We prefer synthetic rather than natural materials. Natural products are almost too valuable. Wood is much harder to produce than metal. And metal is recyclable, while wood isn't."
Wood,

"It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us."

"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."

"It is hardly surprising that the Georgian domestic style emerges as the most remarkable in the world."

"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."

"If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness."

"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way."

"It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces."

"And, of course, supernatural elements just make a story more interesting."

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

"I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning."

"Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training."

"Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands."

"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."
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