A Quote by Ma Yansong
I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden - the Forbidden City - and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial.
Related Quotes
China has some cities, traditional cities, with a long history. They are so beautiful, and they were planned so smartly. I call them gardens on the city scale. For example, Beijing has mountains, waters, lakes, bridges, towers. It was a very poetic city.
By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.
I grew up in Beijing, and there weren't many modern buildings during my childhood. I was influenced by traditional culture - the courtyards, the hutongs, the old city, and all the art forms - so, very naturally, I brought this to my practice.
When we were in Beijing, they were all "it's an honor, you're playing at the oldest rock club in Beijing". And I was all "oh crazy how old is it?" And then were all: "5 years old."Asia is just very different.
My hometown is a very boring city. There isn't a lot of industry - there are a lot of trees. It's not like Beijing where the sky is always dark. In my city the sky is blue and the sun shines.
Go walk the streets of Beijing. It's pretty hard to argue it isn't a modern city. Now, if you go outside [of Beijing], in the rural areas, that's true. But rural America, you can say the same thing, in Appalachia there's an awful lot of poverty and lack of education.
I grew up in Beijing and Beijing roast duck is my favorite. My mom makes it every year for Christmas Eve. How crispy the skin is is how good a duck restaurant is.
Beijing is my favorite city in China.
The Garden Was My Delight. I grew up with gardeners and I just love gardens. I was always very much aware that gardens were important and they were for sharing.
New York is the center of the world. I grew up in Connecticut, outside of the city, and my father commuted to the city for work.
When we started out, we didn't really think that the era of great opportunity would end one day. We were much too busy developing our companies. But in today's China you can build a city, even a mega-city like Beijing or Shanghai, within 10 or 15 years. And then you are done. So in real estate development, the Gründerzeit is over. But that is not the case in other sectors.
Our government has this three-city concept where Tirupati will be a city of lakes and a tourist destination, Amaravati a blue-green city, and Visakhapatnam a beautiful city buzzing with economic activity and jobs.
I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee; I went to college in New Orleans before moving to New York City for graduate school. Both sets of my grandparents grew up in rural Mississippi and brought a lot of agrarian knowledge to Memphis, which is an urban center in the South. Both sets had amazing backyard gardens. My paternal grandfather, practically every inch of available space was green.
I grew up in Summerhill in Dublin's inner city, and I came across an open audition, and they were looking for inner city kids who had not acted. I signed up.
I grew up in an inner city neighborhood called the Benson Hurst section of Brooklyn, which was a very embracing, warm, family-type neighborhood.
A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.
Related Authors
Arthur Erickson Quotes
Canadian
Architect
Frank Gehry Quotes
American
Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
American
Architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes
American
Architect
Maya Lin Quotes
American
Architect
Neri Oxman Quotes
American
Architect
Norton Juster Quotes
American
Architect
Peter Marino Quotes
American
Architect
Philip Johnson Quotes
American
Architect
Rem Koolhaas Quotes
Dutch
Architect
Richard Rogers Quotes
British
Architect
Santiago Calatrava Quotes
Spanish
Architect
Tadao Ando Quotes
Japanese
Architect
Thom Mayne Quotes
American
Architect
Walter Gropius Quotes
German
Architect
Zaha Hadid Quotes
British
Architect