Life is more important than architecture.
Interpretation
Life takes precedence over physical structures and designs.
Oscar Niemeyer's quote emphasizes the importance of human experiences and the essence of life itself over the aesthetic and functional elements of architecture. It suggests that while architecture can beautify the environment, it is ultimately the people, their interactions, and their lives that give significance to such structures.
In practice
During a seminar on urban development, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for community-focused designs.
I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete... This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.
We need to feel that life is important; we need that fantasy so we can live a little better.
Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.
When you have a large space to conquer, the curve is the natural solution.
I was attracted by the curve β the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.
Curves are the essence of my work because they are the essence of Brazil, pure and simple.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist
Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
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