No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.

Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

Today’s developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.

Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.

Architecture doesn’t come from theory. You don’t think your way through a building.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.

The heart, not the head, must be the guide.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

The innovative spirit was America’s strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.

Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.

We find Japan a little more difficult to understand because it has proven its 20th century prowess though the ancient traditions still persist.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?

The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature’s ecosystems.

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

God’s designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

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

Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

Tahiti has been spoiled for many years, but Bali is one of the few cultures with origins in one of the great ancient cultures which is still alive.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

The artist likes to seem totally responsible for his work. Often he begins to explain it, to make it appear as if it were a reasonable process.