A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.
I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.
Cant you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?
I was already writing about the idea of a ‘multiverse’ in the 1970s, though I might have called it the ‘pluriverse.’ How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.
I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.
What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.
It’s a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.
You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.
I’ve been a lucky man. I’ve only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.
The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it’s co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body – you can’t help but be moved.
Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is – certain, even dogmatic – until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.
A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.
The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.
What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.