I’ve said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.
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.
My buildings should have an emotional core –a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.
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.
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.
When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.
Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.
In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.
My relationship to plants becomes closer and closer. They make me quiet; I like to be in their company.
There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don’t work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.
I need a close contact to the client, whoever it is, and a commitment of the client to go out and do a process together. I want to do the best for him. I need his respect and his patience. I want to work with a sophisticated person who’s interested in a good building and not in my name.
The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it’s done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I’m not doing something strange.
If, early on, you know how things are put together, then you can build. The architect is in charge of making – he is not an artist.
Normally, architects render a service. They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.
Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.
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.
Details, when they are successful, are not mere decoration. They do not distract or entertain. They lead to an understanding of the whole of which they are an inherent part.
Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world.
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 sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city’s space.
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 meanings, and speak its own language.