Ma Yansong Quotes

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.

And exciting buildings are fine periodically.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

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.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

Architecture is the work of nations

Among the things I love about London is that there is a lot of green space and that the buildings are not very tall.

I came to London constantly, working with Ninja Theory on 'DmC Devil May Cry,' and I kind of fell in love with this amazing architecture, where you have these buildings that have clearly been around a long time, and they have this amazing gothic look, and then on the first floor, it's a McDonald's!