David Chipperfield Quotes

Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.

There are a lot of bad films out there. There's a lot of bad architecture out there, and I think sometimes it takes a lot of time to begin to see what's really good. And I think what the test seems to be is, what really sticks with you. And what really becomes a part of your life.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

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.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

No matter how hard I tried to popularize, I never cheapened a great work of art.

There's always been an ongoing struggle between commerce and art.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

I used to always say - and I think a lot of artists think of it this way - that when you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.