Elizabeth Diller

Architecture, by definition, is always standing still.

— Elizabeth Diller

I think idiosyncrasy is great.

— Elizabeth Diller

I have a real survivor's instinct.

— Elizabeth Diller

As a kid, I imagined being an artist.

— Elizabeth Diller

I don't really know what 'starchitect' means. I take it as a pejorative because it means that you're sought-after.

— Elizabeth Diller

We try to make buildings last long and be resilient but also be not so idiosyncratic that they can't change.

— Elizabeth Diller

Each project is torturous and joyful, and it's always an inspiration.

— Elizabeth Diller

When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt.

— Elizabeth Diller

In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas.

— Elizabeth Diller

Being a New Yorker and someone that goes to MoMA as a patron, I want it to be good.

— Elizabeth Diller

We like to take impossible things and actually make them happen.

— Elizabeth Diller

Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement.

— Elizabeth Diller

Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs…

— Elizabeth Diller

My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.

— Elizabeth Diller

As a student, I hadn't really been interested in architecture at all, but when I started teaching, it grew into me -…

— Elizabeth Diller

I hate digital calendars, so I use pen and paper or the palm of my hand for my daily schedule. I get…

— Elizabeth Diller

In a progressively privatised city, the defence of public space, the production of new public space, and saving what is public really…

— Elizabeth Diller

Architects and food at a construction site equals indigestion. We're always looking for details that haven't been executed correctly.

— Elizabeth Diller

Many tools are indispensable for my work, from a utility knife to parametric-modeling software, like Digital Project. But it's important not to…

— Elizabeth Diller

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or…

— Elizabeth Diller

Theatre is real-time - you get that real-time audience reaction, which is fantastic. And with art pieces, people don't ever have to…

— Elizabeth Diller

We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at…

— Elizabeth Diller

The public brings our buildings to life, and we try to choreograph a lot of things, but our most successful work functions…

— Elizabeth Diller

I cannot read on a Kindle. I love the physical experience of holding a book, cracking it open, and the process of…

— Elizabeth Diller

I was a rebel. I never wanted to build. We thought of architecture as intellectually bankrupt and slightly corrupt, and I was…

— Elizabeth Diller

In the 1970s, New York was known as a place of great artistic production. Slowly, my city went from a place of…

— Elizabeth Diller

I can't live without my 15-inch MacBook Pro. I drag it everywhere I go. I love having a big screen with me…

— Elizabeth Diller

I believe in planning logics where you have neighbourhoods, and you don't just do one building at a time.

— Elizabeth Diller

I never thought I was going to be an architect in the conventional sense.

— Elizabeth Diller

We were kind of arrogant when we started and became really humbled as we were doing architecture. It's really hard to work…

— Elizabeth Diller

I can't imagine having a spouse who is not an architect. It's hard to put myself in the shoes of other couples…

— Elizabeth Diller

In my thesis, I made an intellectual exercise out of creating a pair of buildings that were a repeat but slightly different…

— Elizabeth Diller

We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is…

— Elizabeth Diller

Architects typically inherit programmes or sites. We maybe twist the programme a little bit, bring our own invention into it, and we…

— Elizabeth Diller

Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics,…

— Elizabeth Diller

Whenever I ask Siri for directions or a recommendation, I also ask her a trick question. Her answers are usually wacky. She…

— Elizabeth Diller