Zhang Xin Quotes

I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

Some authors regard morality in the same light as we regard modern architecture. Convenience is the first thing to be looked for.

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.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.

And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.

When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, 'Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?' Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

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

In China, it's very easy to make architecture special because anything you design will look different, as most parts of the city are very similar. They make so many massive residential buildings.

The impact of the creative industries, of design and architecture in particular, are of course economic and they are a great export opportunity.

The shan-shui city idea is trying to bring traditional values and ways of living to modern high-rise architecture.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long? Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugly.

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

The current state of architecture and design requires extensive collaboration and an investigative attitude and we continue to research and develop new technologies.

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

To me, the building [of Museum of Arts and Design]now looks like a lovely jewel box, and the tiled façade reminds me of a heat shield.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.