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Quotes by Architect

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters."


"If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality."


"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."


"When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan."

"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,

"If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it."

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

"Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin."

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


"The mandala describes balance. This is so whatever the pictorial form."

"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."

"The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before."

"Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times."

"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."

"Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process."

"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."

"Dimension regulated the general scale of the work, so that the parts may all tell and be effective."

"Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today."


"The Romans used every housing form known today and they have a remarkably modern look."

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

"Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind."

"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."

"I've always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that."

"Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over."

"Transparency is not the same as looking straight through a building: it's not just a physical idea, it's also an intellectual one."
Idea,

"It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century."

"You'd never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago's Michigan Avenue. But in a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner."


"People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish."

"Larry wanted us to reposition the tower. We wouldn't, and won't. He's been holding back our fees. We want to get paid. And that's it. It'll get solved and we'll carry on with planning Ground Zero."
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