Thom Mayne Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

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

“I'm a private person by nature. I live in my brain half the time, not the world, and I'm not a natural negotiator. But I've learned to negotiate.”

“I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.”

“Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.”

“New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.”

“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 are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.”

“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 visions any more.”

“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 position.”

“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, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.”

“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 to that course.”