Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.
Interpretation
Design is shaped by the local environment and societal influences.
This quote emphasizes that all design—whether in architecture, fashion, or any other field—is inherently influenced by the local climate and cultural context. It suggests that successful design should consider the unique characteristics of its surrounding environment and the people who will interact with it, ensuring that it resonates with the local context and community.
In practice
In a speech about sustainable architecture, one might say, 'As Norman Foster pointed out, everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.'
We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'
As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.
The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.
It takes a lot of effort to make a building look effortless.
Architecture is an expression of values.
What I am after, above all, is expression.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.
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