I like the fact that I like to think out-of-the-box. Thinking out-of-the-box goes along with dressing out-of-the-box and living out-of-the-box. If you want to come up with a really original design idea and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That's all.
I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that's very pop. I don't want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.
When you're 20, you think the whole world is talented, but whenyou get older, you realize the opposite is true.
I like my clients. All of my clients say, "Peter. You're talented. But, your best virtue is your discretion." They really don't want to be talked about.
I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.
People's first homes are always disasters. It's like the first time you have sex. It's never as good as later on. It always gets better.
After the motorcycle trips I take for one or two weeks, I have trouble getting back into a car, because I feel claustrophobic with all of that metal around me, and I can't see anything. I feel seriously dangerous in a car after riding on a bike, because your field of vision is so closed in. And then I think about all these little bourgeois people driving around in their cars - it's actually hideous. It cramps you on the head, it cramps you on the side, it puts you in a box on wheels... It's a terrible experience. Motorcycles are about opening the field of vision.
I always want to encourage young artists. As the budgets get smaller, that might provide an opening for younger artists and more experimentation. Budgets had gotten quite large for art, as they had for architecture. I'm not going to cut back. The minute someone walks through my door, I go, "That's my thing and you got to let me do it."
When you design someone's house, it's actually painful. I never say, "This house will be a total reflection of you and any defects in it will make you look defective." But people do expect their homes to be reflections of themselves. So what I say is, "Just pretend this is your eighth home. By then you won't care."
The older I get, the less I negotiate. When you first start out, it's 90 percent negotiation and 10 percent suggestion. When you get to a certain point, those figures reverse.
Throughout history, from Abyssinians and Greeks onward, artists, sculptors, and architects have worked together. I find this post - World War II thing, this segmentation of the arts, so lame. It's the laming of the arts.
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I. M. Pei Architect