I grew up in a craftsman's home, where things were done with our own hands. I did cabinetmaking for four years and I hated it.

When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

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

My buildings should have an emotional core –a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.

If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.

Architecture is not about form

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

Presence is like a gap in the flow of history, where all of [a] sudden it is not past and not future.

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.

If you encase yourself in stone like a fossil, you’ll have an existence, but not a life.

I grew up in a family where the women were just nuts. They didn't stand around in cardigans making polite conversation while they chopped tomatoes.

Dance is movement, is action, and like all action, it reveals us to ourselves in the doing.

We got to think of something for people to do.

Your habits will determine your future.

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

The only way to get our values right is to see, not the beginning, but the end of the way, to see things not only in the light of time but in the light of Eternity.

They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.

There are three orchestras in Munich, all world-quality, in a city of one million. Yet every hall is full.