Toyo Ito Quotes

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.

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

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.

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

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

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.

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

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.

New York is just an energy. There's a beauty to the way it's laid out: the architecture, the way the planning is. It's huge, but you really do get to experience more than your own existence here. It's kinda hard to isolate yourself from different types of people, different types of ideas or communities.

The times in my life I've felt the most alive is when I'm having a connection with people. We need to hack cities in a way to bring back that community culture.

In 'Palaces for the People,' Eric Klinenberg offers a new perspective on what people and places have to do with each other, by looking at the social side of our physical spaces.

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

In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.

Not only did America invent the skyscraper, it invented the skyline.

My goal is always to create something exceptional that enhances cities and enriches the lives of the people who live and work in them.

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!

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

For the first project I did in North America, I was asked as an artist, not as an architect, to collaborate on a big development in the heart of Toronto. I was working with other artists and was in charge of giving form to a street, and I proposed a galleria.

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

You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.