Architectural Adaptation Quotes

I think you need to, as an architect, understand the essence of a place and create a building that feels like it resonates with the culture of a place. So my buildings in India or in Kansas City or in Arkansas or in Singapore, they come out different because the places are so different.

New York City is as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane …. Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. When they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end and call it a skyscraper …. Aerial suburbs …. Mansions in the sky.

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age.

We try to respond as closely as we can to the nature of each city, to the traditions, to their expectations. I don't believe that architects should be imposing their style or their plans on every city in the world.

In the summer there are twelve cottonwoods around the pool, which in the winter become an elevated thicket. There is also a courtyard with a small garden of plants that stay green all year. The winter is bleak. This place is primarily for the installation of art, necessarily for whatever architecture of my own that can be included in an existing situation, for work, and altogether for my idea of living.

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.

I have a weird thing - if I can't see where all the walls in my house are, I get a little bit freaked out. I think New York has Stockholm Syndrome'd my sense of space and what a house should be.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

If our designs for private houses are to be correct, we must at the outset take note of the countries and climates in which they are built.

Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic.

The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.