Peter Zumthor Quotes

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

I think of architecture as a piece of clothing to wrap around human beings

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

A building is no good if someone's got to explain to you why it's good. You can't say you don't know enough about architecture - that's ridiculous. It's got to work on many levels.

Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

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.

When I worked in those offices, it was just irritating to me that somebody sat there and designed this place, never thinking that you would walk from here to there, and they didn't care. The one guy designs it, gives it to the other guy, he looks at it; no one thinks about all the people that gotta walk through it. So I think the best way to show those banal moments is to be just flat and wide.

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

We make our buildings, and then our buildings make and shape us.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

I have an interest in architecture, although more theoretically than anything else. I think architecture tries to understand what the body wants to occupy, not the body itself.

Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.

I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculptureand painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.

We shape our homes and then our homes shape us.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music.