Zitat des Tages von Thom Mayne:
Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.
Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.
Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.
It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.
My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.
I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.
So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.
But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.
I've grown up a little bit. I understand the importance of the negotiation. It is a collective act.
I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.
For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.
Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.
Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.
I've been such an outsider my whole life.
The multiplicity of ideas is what I'm interested in.
So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.
Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.
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.
There is no modern prototype for a campus. You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.
I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.
I think my clients would tell you I'm a problem solver. I'm not there to agree with people. I'm there to articulate a point of view. Am I insistent and tenacious? Absolutely. I could not get this work done if I was not.
I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.
I lived in a state of rage from 12 to 20. Until college, I was beyond an outsider. I was a voyeur of life.
