Peter Zumthor Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.”

“If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.”

“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.”

“I'm not mainly interested in what buildings mean as symbols or vehicles for ideas.”

“My relationship to plants becomes closer and closer. They make me quiet; I like to be in their company.”

“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.”

“Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.”

“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.”