Thom Mayne Quotes

33 quotes in 478 categories

• Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.
• 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…
• My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.
• The multiplicity of ideas is what Im interested in.
• You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the…
• Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people.
• 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…
• Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.
• 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.
• Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional…
• We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.
• So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude…
• 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…
• The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.
• For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.
• I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects…
• I've been such an outsider my whole life.
• It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy…
• So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction,…
• 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…

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