Jaquelin T. Robertson Quotes

Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.

I think you need to, as an architect, understand the essence of a place and create a building that feels like it resonates with the culture of a place. So my buildings in India or in Kansas City or in Arkansas or in Singapore, they come out different because the places are so different.

My architecture is very much place-related.

For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect.

Chinese buildings are like American buildings, with big footprints. People don't care about daylight or fresh air.

Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.

Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

Building design isn't trendy.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

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.

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.

The future of architecture is culture.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.