I never thought I was going to be an architect in the conventional sense.
— Elizabeth Diller
I was a rebel. I never wanted to build. We thought of architecture as intellectually bankrupt and slightly corrupt, and I was always more interested in other forms of discourse.
I believe in planning logics where you have neighbourhoods, and you don't just do one building at a time.
Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology.
In my thesis, I made an intellectual exercise out of creating a pair of buildings that were a repeat but slightly different - dissonant things make me uncomfortable.
As a kid, I imagined being an artist.
Architects and food at a construction site equals indigestion. We're always looking for details that haven't been executed correctly.
We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.
We try to make buildings last long and be resilient but also be not so idiosyncratic that they can't change.
I can't live without my 15-inch MacBook Pro. I drag it everywhere I go. I love having a big screen with me at all times, especially in transit.
We like to take impossible things and actually make them happen.
Architects typically inherit programmes or sites. We maybe twist the programme a little bit, bring our own invention into it, and we feel perfectly happy when we walk away. It doesn't feel like quite enough.
When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt.
Each project is torturous and joyful, and it's always an inspiration.
Being a New Yorker and someone that goes to MoMA as a patron, I want it to be good.
Theatre is real-time - you get that real-time audience reaction, which is fantastic. And with art pieces, people don't ever have to explain themselves. You can do something and really follow a research. With architecture, you have to be much more public. You have to build consensus. You have to work within the law. There are more complexities.
I can't imagine having a spouse who is not an architect. It's hard to put myself in the shoes of other couples where each partner brings totally different things from their day to the table.
I have a real survivor's instinct.
Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement.
In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas.
Whenever I ask Siri for directions or a recommendation, I also ask her a trick question. Her answers are usually wacky. She scolds me for cursing, which I love, but she has no problem with ethics. If I say, 'Remind me to rob a bank at 3 P.M.,' she responds, 'Here's your reminder for today at 3 P.M.: Rob a bank. Shall I create it?'
Many tools are indispensable for my work, from a utility knife to parametric-modeling software, like Digital Project. But it's important not to confuse the tool for the content, as some designers under 30 do.
I think idiosyncrasy is great.
We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public.
As a student, I hadn't really been interested in architecture at all, but when I started teaching, it grew into me - rather than me growing into it.
I don't really know what 'starchitect' means. I take it as a pejorative because it means that you're sought-after.
In a progressively privatised city, the defence of public space, the production of new public space, and saving what is public really for the public is very important.
We were kind of arrogant when we started and became really humbled as we were doing architecture. It's really hard to work with budgets and deadlines and all of these collaborators and all of these voices and special interests.
The public brings our buildings to life, and we try to choreograph a lot of things, but our most successful work functions in unanticipated ways. Like the Blur Building. When little kids got in there, they cried or laughed or ran around. And no matter how much theory we put on top of it, it didn't matter: it worked.
My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.
Architecture, by definition, is always standing still.
My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.
I cannot read on a Kindle. I love the physical experience of holding a book, cracking it open, and the process of making the right half weigh less than the left half. I only read hardcover books because I like the resistance and the presence on a bookshelf.
I hate digital calendars, so I use pen and paper or the palm of my hand for my daily schedule. I get much more satisfaction out of physically crossing things out than deleting.
In the 1970s, New York was known as a place of great artistic production. Slowly, my city went from a place of production to a place of consumption.
Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses.
