Thom Mayne Quotes

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decora...

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added valu...

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

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 experience comes first. That has the de...

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, yo...

The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

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 towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this...

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offeri...

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 architects to have these grand v...

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 logic because the most interesting parts of the work...

But I absolutely believe that 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 to change behaviour.