What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.
A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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.
It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.
The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.
Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.
That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated.
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.
