Thom Mayne Quotes

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Thom Mayne

Profession : Architect

Birth : January 19, 1942

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

Thom Mayne

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.

Thom Mayne

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Thom Mayne

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Thom Mayne

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

Thom Mayne

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

Thom Mayne

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Thom Mayne

New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.

Thom Mayne

There is no modern prototype for a campus. You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.

Thom Mayne

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Thom Mayne

For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

Thom Mayne

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.

Thom Mayne

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

Thom Mayne

So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.

Thom Mayne

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

Thom Mayne

Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.

Thom Mayne

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Thom Mayne

Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people.

Thom Mayne

Find a place that you are comfortable with. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make a lot of mistakes.

Thom Mayne