Quote

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it. Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

My wife's an architect, so she definitely has a very high-risk artistic profession, and she gets the idea that you're really sensitive, you really care what people think, you have a low threshold for criticism.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.

There is a profound ethic to architecture which is different from the other arts.