A Quote by Peter Zumthor

When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.

Peter Zumthor

Quote Topics

Design Am Building Concentrate Depths Form Going History Place Qualities Sensuous Site Specific Try Which

Quote Author

Peter Zumthor
Swiss - Architect
Born: April 26, 1943

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

Herbert Muschamp

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective.

François-René de Chateaubriand

A movie as specific as 'Heathers,' which took place in a specific time and specific place and in which many of the characters got killed off, I never thought it made sense to see a sequel.

Michael Lehmann

I'm always conscious of the context, the history, the specific environment of anything that I design and what it is going to be operating within.

Michael Bierut

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

Peter Zumthor

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

Frank Lloyd Wright

When I don't plumb the depths or the opportunities of each day, I don't have joy.

Victoria Principal

The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head.

Michael Graves

Green Giant contained a very strong and clear site and building design concept. Green Giant had strong formal, aesthetic and programmatic concepts, coupled with a good understanding and incorporation of 2030 Palette design strategies.

Edward Mazria

The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people's lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.

Chris Killip

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time, I have ideas for paintings all the time, and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad, which I design on, and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

Jane Seymour

There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach.

Rem Koolhaas

I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.

Cesar Pelli

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.