Thom Mayne Quotes

The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects' personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.

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.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

The 'International Style of Modernism' came with the advent of building services. In the end, the architecture became like a container space, essentially like a boring box with a basement full of machinery to make it inhabitable. As a result, buildings literally started to look identical all over the planet.

I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

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.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.

I hope that America as a whole, and especially its architects, will become more seriously involved in producing a new architectural culture that would bring the nation to the apex - where it has stood before - and lead the world.

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.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

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.

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.