I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.
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.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.
I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.
The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
The basic architecture of Dodd-Frank makes sense. At the same time, as a number of regulators and legislators have observed, the act was a complex effort that produced thousands of pages of rules.
It was my interest in happiness that led me to the subject of habits, and of course, the study of habits is really the study of happiness. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness.
I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.
The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.
Seeing architecture differently from the way you see the rest of life is a bit weird. I believe one should be consistent in all that one does, from the books you read to the way you bring up your children. Everything you do is connected.
There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.
Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.
Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.
Of course I know very little about architecture, and the older I get the less I know.
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.
Each new situation requires a new architecture.
The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
I live in a craftsman house, but I'm a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.
To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.
Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.
In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn't very good at it.
By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.
Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.
In a way, architecture is about communication. That's an aspect of the discipline that is somewhat lacking, and there's definitely room for more progression into that area. I suppose that gives me a bit of a different edge. I'm also very, very used to doing a lot of exhaustive research and finding interesting information from different sources.
I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development.
I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.
We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of 'the use.' Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty.
Charleston has something for everyone, rain or shine. Its architecture is unparalleled. Carriage rides are great for seeing the city and hearing the history behind certain houses and the area.
I don't know why I've always been so captivated by architecture.
I think it's important to approach a house in a way that's reflective of the original environment. Maybe I'm a sentimentalist, but I think that certain geographies call out for certain architecture. I like residences that reflect their place.
Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.
