A building is hard to judge. It takes many years to find out whether it works. It's not as simple as asking the people in the office whether they like it.
As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. It's like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.
We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
Critics are entitled to have an opinion, but how can they judge how comfortable a building is? No critic is smart enough to judge how a building will perform over time.
Today, we have sophisticated building technology: we can calculate and simulate the environments and performance of the building, the thermal exposure of envelop, or the air flow through an urban space or structure.
Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. I'm not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place.
Because glass is at once structural and transparent, it is relatively easy to consider the integration of structural and environmental building performance within a single integrated skin.
