Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation.

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

The heart, not the head, must be the guide.

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century.

Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own.

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

The innovative spirit was America's strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

We find Japan a little more difficult to understand because it has proven its 20th century prowess though the ancient traditions still persist.

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.