Zhang Xin Quotes

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

Great architecture of the past was always clear. SFMOMA is still a simple building to understand.

Every action or inaction has an impact-good or bad-upon our surroundings, and anything we do today will have an impact on the lives of our grandchildren.

SUCCESS is not about HERE and NOW. you must pass the TEST OF TIME. the litmus test is FIFTY YEARS from now. SUCCESS is SUCCESSION.

Everyone must be clear that business as usual is not an option. Most of us live in buildings erected long before we were born and our successors will have to live with the environmental consequences of the buildings we construct today. It is vital that we minimise harmful impacts for those who come after us

For me [ Giovanni Lorenzo ] Bernini, [Francesco ] Borromini, and [Donato] Bramante have been as significant as Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn. I still marvel at their works, which have a quality and a timelessness that I seek to have in our projects.

I had the good fortune of living in Rome for seven years, from 1994 to 2001. So, I kind of saw firsthand the impact that Pope John Paul II had on people.

For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across--hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.

Most of what I know about environmental conservation I learned from my father, who has been a leader within the movement for over 30 years.

The future of profit is purpose.

In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we need a metric for health impact, and with this metric we can then assess the value of the introduction of a new product and pay its innovator accordingly, say on the basis of the product's measured health impact during its first ten years on the market. In exchange, innovators must of course renounce the usual rewards they are otherwise entitled to, namely the patent-protected markup on the price of their product.

Spain is so different from the United States. It seemed to have a history, and the buildings are years and years and years old. Here in the United States an old building is about 17 (years old), and over there it's from 500 B.C., it's incredible.

Dear young people, let me now ask you a question. What will you leave to the next generation? Are you building your lives on firm foundations, building something that will endure?

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.

I've always been very involved with environmental issues. I was fortunate to be one of the speakers at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero some years back, and Bruce Johnson and I served on the board of the Surfrider Foundation here at home. Locally and globally, we need to be doing everything we can to help Mother Earth.

I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.

Architecture is not just for the moment, it is not just for the next fashion magazine.

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven't withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture.

Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.

You may make something you don't think is very important during your lifetime and it'll last for a thousand years.

Many years from now, what would you like people to line up and thank you for?

What makes greatness is starting something that lives after you.

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.