Contemporary Architecture Quotes

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now—our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

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.

Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long? Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugly.

I like Modernism. I grew up around these sort of eclectic, heavily carved, baroque, rococo, highly ornamented styles that were in my life from the time that I was a child until now in my business life. So I like clean, straight, minimalist lines.

Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.

The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.

Architects create spaces that accommodate human activity. As opposed to many of its contemporary counterparts, Dune'is not so much focused on the styling of that activity, as on the supporting of it.

I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Zaha Hadid's Maxxi Museum is proof that Rome and contemporary architecture are no longer a paradox. The building is characteristic Hadid - with curving lines and organic shapes - and the permanent collection already boasts works by Francesco Clemente, William Kentridge, and Gerhard Richter.

A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of authentic democracy.

In this tour around the world I was not interested in contemporary buildings because I had seen contemporary buildings actually until they came out of my ears in a sense.