Thom Mayne Quotes
"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."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Art, Work, Development, Culture, Risk)
"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."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Ideas, Existence)
"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 value."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Architecture, Idea, Value, Walking)
"The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Art, Society, Ideas, Ignorance)
"The multiplicity of ideas is what I'm interested in."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Ideas, Multiplicity)
"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 deepest effect on us."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Architecture, Experience, Effect, First, Space)
"Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Nature, Work, Reality)
"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 and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Art, Public, Reason, World)
"We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Development, Meaning)
"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."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Architecture, Change, Communication, Environment)
"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."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Architecture, Art, Time, Work, Logic, World)
"Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: People, Agreement, Numbers, Projects, Public)
"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 pounding my fist on the table."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Work, Order, Sense)
"I've been such an outsider my whole life."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Life)
"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."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Architecture, Idea, Old, Today, Visions, World)
"For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Work, Meaning)
"Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Work)
"Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Nature, Idea, Being, Reality)
"My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness."
- Thom Mayne
(Related: Words)