To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.
Frei OttoRead
Buildings are 'humane' only when they promote peaceful human co-existence.
Interpretation
Buildings should foster harmony and peaceful interactions among people.
Frei Otto's quote emphasizes the important role that architecture plays in promoting social harmony. By designing structures that prioritize human connection and interaction, buildings can contribute to a more peaceful coexistence among individuals within a community.
In practice
This quote can be used during a presentation on community design principles.
To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.
My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.
Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?
Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.
We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.
One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city
It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies
Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
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