Thom Mayne Quotes

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

You can't make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don't know what they want. That's what they're looking at you for.

I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.

I've been such an outsider my whole life.

The multiplicity of ideas is what Im interested in.

So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.

Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people.

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.

For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

Art in progress. MAK has occupied a unique and valuable space as international host for discourse between the arts and architecture.

The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.