If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform.
I think regionalism was a little easier before mass communication was made possible. This is not to say that regionalism doesn't exist anymore. I think it does.
The world is meaningless and therefore it's funny.
I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds, and in our case, the realities we create can be as real as concrete. These kinds of ideas, of wild imagination, go into the question of how you make a world.
Setting up absurd worlds with rules to violate - it's one of the things I hope to achieve with my work.
Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.
The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.
I think of architecture as language, and I look within the intra-communication between architects.
When I would present my work as a student, often I would hear, "Your project is too formal" - it's too form-based; it's too form-driven. Which is kind of shocking for a visual practice, for someone to say something discouraging about a focus on an exploration of aesthetics.
The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.
I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds.
In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints.
The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either.
Many artists I enjoy have a large body of work, and eventually the message is derived out from the sum of its parts.
I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact.
In 500 years, English has changed a lot, and right now we're undergoing an extremely rapid rate of accelerated advancement in terms of technology, but I still have a hard time believing that we're going to stop speaking to each other. The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either. It's going to continue to create a cultural affect where people will be able to understand something beyond function that may otherwise be foreign to them.
I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.
It is possible to construct small realities that contain political or philosophical responses, not necessarily just practical or economical responses.
The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better.
Architectural drawing is a language with conventions where the rules can be deliberately misused; a well-composed architectural drawing can both contain correct and incorrect arrangements of meaningful things.
Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.
The obsession was so real and so prolonged. Sleeping was kind of like taking breaks from continuing the obsession.
What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.
Aesthetics is both politics and philosophy, a series of agreements and disagreements between subjective minds.
I see architecture as a form of communication over time.
