Bernard Tschumi Quotes

We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

If we are to perpetuate the state, we must not only produce citizens, but good citizens - men and women of sound bodies, clear minds and clean souls.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

If you don’t put positive things in the city’s open spaces, they will be filled by negative things.

We try to respond as closely as we can to the nature of each city, to the traditions, to their expectations. I don't believe that architects should be imposing their style or their plans on every city in the world.

Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

The emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites.

My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

As many an architect will tell you, human behavior changes according to the environment.

My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.

From avoiding littering to encouraging local economy, there is a lot each one of us can do that will go a long way in keeping the country's cultural legacy intact.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

Too many developers still treat cultural strategies as a fig leaf to get planning permission, rather than make a thoughtful, genuine commitment to the cultural life of their areas.

I do all I can to make my world a better place to live in for me and for my kids as well.

We're planting trees to break up the concrete jungle. We're building public transportation and affordable housing.