The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
It is hardly surprising that the Georgian domestic style emerges as the most remarkable in the world.
Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.
As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.
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.
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.
I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington is an ornate, eclectic building on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Massachusetts Avenue which was built originally for Edward Hamlin Everett, the man who put the crimp in bottle caps.
Ultimately, the artistic part of architecture has always interested me.
Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.
With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
Buildings should not look like Lady Gaga.
Architecture is the work of nations
Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.
The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Mr. Gehry and the values he promulgates.
I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards.
Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.
In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.
The colors I choose there was to paint the first hotel, the Disneyland Hotel. Because of the cloudy sky we had in Paris, it had to be a particular kind of color who will fight those grey days. And also something you can see when you're driving up 'There it is! We're arriving!'
The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
