68 Quotes by Thom Mayne

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.

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

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

You might say that when you step inside, you’re entering a honorific space, but that’s something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

It’s too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.

I’ve been such an outsider my whole life.

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.

I’m interested in conflict and confrontation.

You can’t make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don’t know what they want. That’s what they’re looking at you for.