Will Self Quotes

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

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.

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

For the first project I did in North America, I was asked as an artist, not as an architect, to collaborate on a big development in the heart of Toronto. I was working with other artists and was in charge of giving form to a street, and I proposed a galleria.

You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

One great building does not make a great city.

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

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

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

I've never looked at a suburban building as being a minor building and an urban building as being a major building.