Quote of the Day
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. ... The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. ... Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. ... After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. ... I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. ... Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity."
Excerpts from an interview for the documentary 'Mandela,' 1994
"To think of culture most would think as if they are dealing with the majority, that is why social science exists, never knowing that culture remains distinct individually, constantly developed and constructed from time to time."
Design with Honesty
"In the notion of partial figure and the difficulty of reading, comes the notion of affect, that is the physical essential idea of people in space."Peter Eisenman
"Democracy and architecture has been misunderstood. Architecture is always for specific users. To give an analogy, when we eat a burger of vegetable and chicken, vegetable does not need to pretend to be chicken, while chicken need not to pretend that it is not chicken itself and yet it taste so nice when one eat them all together. I guess this explains how well the quality of difference creates coherency."
Design with Honesty
"I read the book of Job last night - I don't think God comes out well in it."
Virginia Woolf
"Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?"
Richard Dawkins
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live."
Mortimer Adler
"I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun."
Thomas A. Edison
- "You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play."
Warren Beatty
- "The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
Samuel Johnson
- "What makes a space looks interesting? Composition. It makes you feel like taking out your camera to record it, that moment you become creative, a setting which leads one into contemplation."
Design with Honesty
- "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
Aristotle
"A City without old building is like man without a memory."
Konrad Smigielski
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
Socrates
"Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition."
James Whistler
After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared
Arthur Erickson
Jim Carrey
Steven Spielberg
"I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives."
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
Albert Einstein
"All children are born artists."
Ken Robinson
"The purpose of life is not to be happy - but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all."
"if you were in Rome, live in the Roman way; if you are elsewhere, live as they do there."
Leo Rosten
"The bird has an honor that man does not have. Man lives in the traps of his abdicated laws and traditions; but the birds live according to the natural law of God who causes the earth to turn around the sun."
Kahlil Gibran
"if you were in Rome, live in the Roman way; if you are elsewhere, live as they do there."
St Ambrose
"It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract."
I.M.Pei, 1978
"Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character."
Alan Watts
"I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art. "
Richard Rogers
"All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual."
Albert Einstein
"The more you practice architecture, the less you become fascinated by building but human life."
Design with Honesty
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. ."
Vladimir Nabokov
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
Albert Einstein
"The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page."
Saint Augustine
"There are three hundred and sixty degrees, why stick to one?"
Zaha Hadid
"Theophrastus, urging men to acquire learning rather than to put their trust in money...The man of learning is the only person in the world who is neither a stranger when in a foreign land, nor friendless when he has lost his intimates and relatives; on the contrary, he is a citizen of every country, and can fearlessly look down upon the troublesome accidents of fortune. But he who thinks himself entrenched in defences not of learning but of luck, moves in slippery paths, struggling through life unsteadily and insecurely."
Vitruvius, Ten Books On Architecture
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
Albert Einstein
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."
Confucius
"It is better to travel well than to arrive."
Buddha
"There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else."
Oscar Wilde
"What I'm trying to do is to express ideas in my work, so that when people experience the work they say 'why is it like this?' They have to ask questions and these questions lead to other questions. It is not so much about syntactics or semiotics. I'm much more concerned with how people react in an environment to architectural ideas and how they understand architectural ideas not for meaning but for what I call "affect"."
Peter Eisenman
"Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds."
Orison Swett Marden
"For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.”
Frank Gehry
"I don't do function.”
Frank Gehry
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.”
Albert Einstein
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Winston Churchill
"We pierce doors and windows to make a house; and it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.”
Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
"We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated."
Thom Mayne
"The essential nature of thinking is that it does not provide answers but it leads to question, and when one questions, he participates.”
Design with Honesty
"Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."
Frank Lloyd Wright
"function considerations are easier to assess than aesthetic, but it may not be possible to satisfy conflicting requirements due to the constraints of budget or inappropriate land, therefore compromises must be found.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
"Man acts as thought he were shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation.”
Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking
"Questioning and thinking are not a means to an end, they are self-justifying.”
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking
"Architecture is a gestalt.”
Design with Honesty
"All ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and used by the creative person with pride and satisfaction.”
Mark Twain
"Nature knows no uniformity, but seeks ever greater variety."
John Habraken, Uniformity as a symptom, SUPPORTS: an alternative to mass housing
"When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized."
Design with Honesty
"If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it."
Albert Einstein
"Green design tends to be holistic."
Design with Honesty
"Architecture shapes behavior."
Design with Honesty
"Architecture with preconceived idea and without the beginning of something is just like a sugar coated cake with icy toppings."
Design with Honesty
"Crit session is a liquid network where ideas happen."
Design with Honesty
"Architecture is not created upon people to like it, but it has to work in terms of how you want it to work, whether environmentally, socially, culturally etc."
Design with Honesty
"Written texts are a thousand researches, worth a thousand researches."
Design with Honesty
“The best design will never exist but a better one does.”
Design with Honesty
“Rejuvenate, reorganize, rethink.”
Design with Honesty
“Form need not to follow function.”
Design with Honesty
“Idea makes architecture.”
Peter Eisenman
“Do not put faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”
William W. Watt
"...men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture."
Vitruvius, Ten Books On Architecture
"As man no longer needs to depend on natural energy, they became inert to the surrounding environment, what is left was the artificial environment which is resulted from their inner desire, the relationship between the role of their part and the environment as a whole, does not matter."
Design with Honesty
"Instead of remaining 'objective', some arhitecture is today becoming more subjective, more responsive to specific incident(place, time, race, tradition, scale, return to roots, climate, recent history, everyday geography...Yet only appearances change, while underlying procedures and techniques remain the same."
Lucien Kroll,
Subjective architecture in An Architecture of Complexity
"The Green market goes so well especially towards well-educated consumers."
Design with Honesty
“Must such an approach be defeated by the technical difficulties that it generates?”
Lucien Kroll, An Architecture of Complexity
"An intelligent individual would neither agrees nor rejects a fact but he thinks the reason behind it."
Design with Honesty
"Knowing when to take break during design is part of the important process.”
Design with Honesty
"Randomness may give you ideas that you had never thought of, but it does not ensure which path you are going."
Design with Honesty
“Diversity encourages creativity, repetition anaesthetizes it.”
Lucien Kroll, An Architecture of Complexity
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. ."
Vladimir Nabokov