Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.
Interpretation
Designing requires deep focus and emotional connection to the work.
This quote emphasizes the importance of concentration in the design process, suggesting that true creativity involves not just technical skills, but a profound emotional engagement with the subject matter. It likens this concentration to a natural fire, indicating that while it is powerful and intense, it should not be chaotic or distorted, allowing designers to connect deeply with what they create.
In practice
In a design conference, to inspire young designers about the importance of immersion in their work.
If you look at the Earth without architecture, its sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether its a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.
I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.
Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go... it's just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available.
I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it... the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me, I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'
In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
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