In my own work, I'd say I'm a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don't study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that's a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that's a major part of the study.
Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.
How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.
You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.
Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.
The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.
Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.
The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.
There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun.
I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.
Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.
Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.
Glibness will get your anywhere.
I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.
From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.
I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.
To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.
American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?
Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.
So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.
