Ma Yansong Quotes

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.

Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.

I think architecture has to be a gift.

The building art is man's spatial dialogue with his environment and demonstrates how he asserts himself therein and how he masters it.

My house and my garden are built as part of nature, not over it.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

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.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

The future of architecture is culture.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

There's a Danish architecture firm called BIG. I love architecture, and I always check out their work; they're very good at reimagining the way we live. They put the human experience as the focus, with access to air and outdoor space.

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.