Thom Mayne Quotes

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

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.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

Architects think that beauty is a crime.

Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.

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.

I do not write, I build.

People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.

I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

I am but an architectural composer.

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.

I like creating something from nothing and hearing it on the radio or on stage or from somebody driving down the street singing it. It's like building a house, taking a vacant piece of land, and next thing you know, there's a house with somebody living in it.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.

Buildings are always better than drawings and models.