Moshe Safdie Quotes

With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.

Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.

The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

I believe [the architecture firm] Herzog and de Meuron and our collaboration made the product the best it could be.

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

We must be as familiar with the functions of our building as with our materials. We must learn what a building can be, what it should be, and also what it must not be.

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture … needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.

The responsibility of an architect is to create a sense of order, a sense of place, a sense of relationship.

When you design a collection, you have to start with what you love and what you believe in. Unless you do that, you can't stand behind it, so there's no point in doing it.