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.
We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it's an incomparable experience.
Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.
I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
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