Dan Phillips Quotes

My guilty pleasure is I like to watch a lot of HGTV. I really like watching design shows about houses, like extreme homes. Like buying a bridge and turning it into a house or something like that. I really am interested in home design or something like that... architecture.

Growing up I always used to shop in Oxfam. I'd find things for 50p and then take them home, cut them up and make them into something new.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

My brothers were tremendous shack builders. My shacks were horrible. My brothers once built a two-story shack from the ground up that was awesome!

We live in such a consumer-based world. Everything we do, someone else has provided for us, so there is something really empowering about knowing that once I have found the right pieces of wood, I can start a fire and keep myself warm and skin an animal to eat and make its skin into leather.

The general public will almost always stand behind the traditionalists. In the public eye, architecture is about comfort, about shelter, about bricks and mortar.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.

There is no such thing as waste. It is just a question of whether we know how to use something or not.

I went from fashion to glass in 1995, and I'm very interested in architecture.

It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.

I find it slightly absurd that the only thing we consume more of than water is concrete.

When I was about 7 years old, I built a leprechaun trap out of a cardboard box, a biscuit tin and some toilet paper tubes.

One reason that we're so adaptable is that humans are excellent tool users and homebuilders. When our environment doesn't provide us with something that we need, we try to make it ourselves out of whatever is available, whether that's rock or wood or ore or DNA.

Waste is only waste if we waste it.

My father was a master carpenter and builder. Architectural design, engineering design, mechanical design, three-dimensional views, that was my shtick, my forte.

Dimitri seemed like the kind of guy you could throw into the wilderness and he would survive off anything.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

In my lifetime, I want to see humanity start being conscious of our waste, the things we buy, and how we can reuse and recycle things. I want people to live harmoniously with our planet. I hope everybody wakes up and appreciates life.

Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important.

Boys Shack, MEN build homes

What do your parents know, about surviving?

We Americans think we are pretty good! We want to build a house, we cut down some trees. We want to build a fire, we dig a little coal. But when we run out of all these things, then we will find out just how good we really are.