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.
There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.
Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.
It seems to me that it had no other rationale than to show that we are not simply the country of entertainers, but also that of engineers and builders called from across the world to build bridges, viaducts, stations and major monuments of modern industry, the Eiffel Tower deserves to be treated with consideration.
There’s always been this hocus-pocus or magical, mystical thing associated with the making of film that sort of psyches people out and makes them think that this cannot be done; that this is a craft that cannot be learned.
I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
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