Peter Zumthor Quotes

Twenty-first century buildings support a 21st century education - because it is difficult to learn or to teach if you are shivering.

Of course, you’d warm up faster if you took your clothes off.

We want our buildings to work like a machine that will create a pleasurable environment.

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

Most architects say: I want to use this type of glass, even if it's too reflective or doesn't let enough light in. However, the use of a certain type of glass might change the comfort level.

With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.

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 get cold - really cold - when I travel.

I'm sorry to say, but 85% of so-called 'green' firms make some of the ugliest buildings that were ever made. So for God's sake, I don't want to be categorized with them.

You can see these boxes which are covered with metal foils for thermal reasons, and they are also, most of the time, thermally controlled inside to keep reasonable temperature inside each of these containers.

We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.

Because glass is at once structural and transparent, it is relatively easy to consider the integration of structural and environmental building performance within a single integrated skin.

You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that's what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.

The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.

Borrowed garments never keep one warm.

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

Men have higher body temperatures than women. If your heating goes out in winter, I recommend sleeping next to a man. Men are like portable heaters that snore.

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that

Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.

You build a player like you build a house. You start with the foundations. The fundamentals.

Building is a sweet impoverishing.

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.