Thomas Heatherwick Quotes

The Huashan project is a clear example of how an urban element, key to the successful growth of the city, can at the same time improve the quality of life for its citizens, thanks to an integration of all three bridges and the creation of boulevards on the banks of the canal.

Most of the job on DDP was already done by the time I became mayor. So was Gwanghwamun Square, described by many architects as the city's worst architectural creation, and the new city hall. I did not think that redoing them would be the right approach as that would only create new problems.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

One great building does not make a great city.

I have always believed that every great city in history needs a vibrant center.

What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

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.

It's a difficult task to deal with cities. But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live.

I was elected to carry forward my overall vision for the city.

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

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.

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.

I've always been fascinated with how transportation systems work and how cities are designed.

I started my career as an urban planner, working for the city, doing what I would call 'do-gooder' things, particularly for low-income neighborhoods.

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.

I know what it takes to move cities forward. It's not about rhetoric and great speaking, but it takes relationships.

Urban renewal always happens as a symphony of events, and part of the symphony is innovative, optimistic developers with the ability and willingness to transform historic properties.

Brussels is sort of a mini London in the sense that if you think about putting a football pitch in London, people laugh at you. There is just no space.

The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem