Цитаты из книги Penser l'architecture

Producing inner images is a natural process common to everyone. It is part of thinking. Associative, wild, free, ordered, and systematic thinking in images, in architectural, spatial, colorful, and sensuos pictures – this is my favorite definition of design.

My young colleague told me that in Spanish, his mother tongue, the words wood, mother and material were similar: "madera", "madre”, "materia. " We started talking about the sensuous qualities and cultural significance of the elemental materials of wood and stone, and about how we could express these in our buildings.

The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi who saw the beauty of a work of art, in his case the beauty of literature, in his vagueness, openness, and indeterminacy, because this leaves the form open for many different meanings.

I like the idea that beauty has a hard core, and when I think of architecture this association of beauty and a hard core has a certain familiarity.

When I design a building, I frequently find myself sinking into old, half-forgotten memories, and then I try to recollect what the remembered architectural situation was really like, what it had meant to me at the time, and I try to think how ti could help me now to revive that vibrant atmosphere pervaded by the simple…

I believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the task and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and…

If a work of architecture consists of forms and contents that combine to create a strong fundamental mood powerful enough to affect us, it may possess the qualities of a work of art. This art has, however, nothing to do with interesting configurations or originality. It is concerned with insights and understanding, and…

Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the…

I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed...or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different…