Design
(page 2)
Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.
Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.
If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that's why they work. The Rainbow Flag is like other flags in that sense: it belongs to the people.
A shoe is not only a design, but it's a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you're going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.
There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature — if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty — but mostly suffering!
Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.
As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.
A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.
Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them — he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton — and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.
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