Place-Making 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.

Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.

I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.

Too many developers still treat cultural strategies as a fig leaf to get planning permission, rather than make a thoughtful, genuine commitment to the cultural life of their areas.

I wanted to improve the suburban office building; to create a great urban space in a suburban environment with all that implies about interaction, collaboration and creativity.

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't.

We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that aren't worth caring about, and when we have enough of them, we're going to have a country that's not worth defending.

If you give me Times Square, I want to give it back to the people.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

I want people to get inspired by public space - their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.

It is not possible to design always the same. How to be different in each different place - that is the most important work and duty of the architect to find out.

The building art is man's spatial dialogue with his environment and demonstrates how he asserts himself therein and how he masters it.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.

The responsibility of an architect is to create a sense of order, a sense of place, a sense of relationship.

You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

What makes a good festival, above all, is the audience. It feels disconnected when it's meant to bring in people from elsewhere and not meant for the people who actually live there.

Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.