To me it was fascinating, the idea of going to university and studying a subject - architecture - that I had already faced in building some small houses.
There is great mystery in a church. For me, there is a great privilege to be confronted with the design of a church because it shelters the most powerful themes of humanity: birth, marriage, death.
For me, architecture is not just creating a space to protect people but to make them dream as well.
I wanted to design a museum in which everything would seem clear.
The Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio comes from afar. Our land has a millennial history of emigrations: master masons, architects, builders, decorators, plasterers, artists from the world of building.
Great architecture of the past was always clear. SFMOMA is still a simple building to understand.
Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.
Artificial light is used because you can control it better. Technically, it is more homogeneous, more delicate, and less damaging to artwork. But I think it's interesting when the visitor can see variations in the light, when it is not only technical or suitable.
There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.
Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man.
The architect works in the territory of memory.
Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.
The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
A museum is a spiritual place. People lower their voices when they get close to art.
In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.
I want to modernize the ancient. I prefer to work with materials formed naturally over thousands of years.
The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It's a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view, all architecture is sacred.
Mario Botta is a Swiss architect.
