Quotes from 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.

I lived in a state of rage from 12 to 20. Until college, I was beyond an outsider. I was a voyeur of life.

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.

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

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

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

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

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

I'm a private person by nature. I live in my brain half the time, not the world, and I'm not a natural negotiator. But I've learned to negotiate.

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

I've been such an outsider my whole life.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

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

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

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.

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

I think a lot of people have the Frank Lloyd Wright model in their brains. The architect comes in with this act of creation and lays it down, and that's it. But that's not me.