I'm a bad customer for my own buildings! If I'm choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!
Interpretation
The quote reflects the importance of being connected to the environment and community in architectural design.
Cesar Pelli emphasizes the significance of human connection to the surroundings in architecture, using his preference for mid-rise buildings as an example. He believes that buildings should allow inhabitants to experience their environment and maintain a relationship with the ground and community rather than feeling isolated in tall structures.
In practice
In a discussion about urban planning, this quote can highlight the need for mid-rise buildings that promote community interaction.
I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.
Architecture adds dimensions to my life that would be impossible to acquire if I retired. The beautiful thing about architecture is that every project is brand new. I am forced to renew myself with every project. Isn't that wonderful?
I'm particularly interested in the public role that all buildings play. I believe that we architects should try to go beyond our basic obligations to the public, and our opportunities to do so are many.
There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.
A profound design process eventually makes the patron, the architect, and every occasional visitor in the building a slightly better human being.
The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.
What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.
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
Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power. Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters.
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