A Quote by Peter Zumthor

I'm not mainly interested in what buildings mean as symbols or vehicles for ideas.

Peter Zumthor

Quote Topics

Buildings Ideas Interested Mainly Mean Symbols Vehicles

Quote Author

Peter Zumthor
Swiss - Architect
Born: April 26, 1943

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jane Jacobs

Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint.

Harald zur Hausen

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.

Glenn Ligon

In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas.

Trevor Paglen

When terrorists attacked the symbols of our national unity and strength, they failed to realize that they were just symbols of our strength. The real strength of our nation comes from our people - not our buildings.

Michael Enzi

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. So I got an art degree as a default position.

Glenn Ligon

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

James Clerk Maxwell

Symbols mean something and symbols often can spark hope and action in people particularly young people.

Hillary Clinton

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Minoru Yamasaki

People are interested in certain ideas, in certain periods, and then that moves, and okay, now people are more interested in studying this, and there is no perfect balance, and how would you know what the perfect balance is? I mean, what does it mean to have too many Beethoven chairs and too few Stravinsky chairs? I mean, that's kind of a value judgment that isn't really based on humility. We don't know what the optimum number is, so let people figure this out on their own. People are more interested in Beethoven than Stravinsky? Great! Why would that bother me?

Charles Koch

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Thom Mayne

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore White

I think I know what my bandmates like or are interested in or would be interested in doing. I take ideas and I develop them, get rid of some ideas, keep writing, and then new things come up.