The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.
Renzo PianoRead
I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the deep connection between personal background and professional pursuits in architecture.
Renzo Piano emphasizes the influence of his family's legacy of building on his own career in architecture. It highlights how familial roots and experiences shape one's identity and professional choices, suggesting that architecture is not just a profession but a continuation of a familial tradition of craftsmanship and creativity.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of architecture in society, one could use this quote to highlight how personal background influences creativity.
The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.
You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony.
I don't like the idea that the first preparation when you start to design your building has to put your label. I think this is not fair. It's not fair to the building or to the people, to the client, because every building tells a different story.
There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. It's the art of putting all your energy into one thing; it's the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture.
When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.
In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.
Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.
Even a really bad creator would at least have started with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Surprise.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.
I don't think one should be comfortable standing on a stage with people applauding and laughing at every stupid thing you say.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
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