Quotes from Elizabeth Diller

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.

Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement.

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

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.

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.

My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.

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.

When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt.

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.

In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas.