Peter Zumthor Quotes

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

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.

I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.

Night time really is the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone is asleep.

I am finally getting the chance to build large structures and break preconceptions that my designs are just sculptures for people to be in. But my work always comes down to the human scale.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

He [Wladimir Klitschko] likes silence when he fights because it gives him time and room to think. He doesn't like things to get chaotic or crazy.

One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.

Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me... the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt; whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.

I think there's too much mult-tasking going on. I think people need to quiet down and focus and be still more.

I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

I have an interest in architecture, although more theoretically than anything else. I think architecture tries to understand what the body wants to occupy, not the body itself.

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

Somewhat predictably, I'm much more comfortable in front of an audience - and a big audience is even better - than faced with one stranger. This always seems like a bit of a failing on my part, as a human. I think that's also why I put myself situations where I'm forced to engage in other ways.