A Quote by Minoru Yamasaki
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.
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I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.
There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.
There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
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.
For thousands of years, the most physically imposing buildings on earth were temples, churches, and mosques. But in the 20th century, new houses of worship came to dominate the landscape. Yankee Stadium is the most storied of these contemporary shrines.
There was a time in our past when one could walk down any street and be surrounded by harmonious buildings. Such a street wasn't perfect, it wasn't necessarily even pretty, but it was alive. The old buildings smiled, while our new buildings are faceless. The old buildings sang, while the buildings of our age have no music in them.
We shouldn't just look at new buildings but at existing stock building because that's an even greater problem than the new buildings being built. The renovation of existing buildings and making them green is just as important as designing new green buildings.
Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.
I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.
Even here in California with more contemporary buildings. I have a real problem with the low doorframes. It's a curse! That's just another of the many problems I have to live with.
I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.
I graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures.
I go to contemporary galleries all around the world when I can. There's always something historical and something contemporary; those are my rock references.
Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.
In China I told pastors about how, in the West, we have these church buildings and how we go to services each week that last an hour or so. I told them how if we don't like the music or the message then we can go to different buildings and services... They all broke out into laughter. They thought I was the funniest guy they had ever seen.
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