Toyo Ito Quotes

A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

We have to change from 'ego-architecture' to 'eco-architecture.'

I am all for greening tall buildings, but I'm also very keen to note that greening a building doesn't cope with the problem of the tall building in the texture of the city.

I want to do very useful buildings and I would like to find a method of producing these buildings through our technology because I think that this is the only way that we will gain wonderful environment easily in the future.

Because I live in the countryside, I want a building which encourages me to have a fully formed relationship with the environment. It gives me an opportunity to not just be inside or outside, but in a range of contexts.

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

I love when architects build a golf course that compliments the landscape rather than intrudes upon it.

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?

In the United States alone, 450 billion square feet of glass facade is produced every year. What if we could take this chance to use the glass to harness solar energy and allow the architecture to respond to the light and heat of the sun, to create photosynthesis and generate solar energy?

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

All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors.

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings - because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.

I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development.

Building design isn't trendy.

Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.

Shikun & Binui, our infrastructure and real estate company, implements sustainability by building their projects 100% sustainable while educating their employees worldwide.

Many people still believe that 'green' solutions are too expensive, but they are actually much cheaper when all of the costs to public health, social services, and waste handling are factored into the same equation.

There's this very vulnerable planet of ours with finite resources. Architects and designers have, I think, a fair responsibility for conserving energy and materials, and making things durable.

A house isn't really understandable until it settles into the site: until it's built, furnished and lived in for four or five years. The reality is not on paper but in how a building sits on the land - how it relates to trees, to slopes, to water, to gardens.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.