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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.
I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.
If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.
I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
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.
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.
I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.
It's sad to see these old buildings go because they have so many memories, and it's a real personal kind of thing when you play these places. It's part of our history just gone.
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