Architectural Transformation Quotes

I'm amazed every time I come back to Vancouver at how much it's changed. You go away for a month and there's three more skyscrapers.

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall.

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.

To me, the building [of Museum of Arts and Design]now looks like a lovely jewel box, and the tiled façade reminds me of a heat shield.

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

I would love to take an old space and restore it to exactly the way I want it. Like an old factory, just something with great bones and lots of character. I'd take an old house and flip it into something very modern inside, or the other way around.

It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

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.

Many years ago, we were only able to build boxes. Today, architects from all over the world are working with us - Zaha Hadid from London, Gerkan, Marg and Partner from Hamburg, Kengo Kuma from Japan. We brought design and digitalization from abroad to China.

What's interesting is whilst Shanghai has gone stellar - literally, in these massive buildings which have appeared since I first visited - Beijing has become a much more vibrant and interesting place. A lot more business is done here.

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.