Thom Mayne

“I think my clients would tell you I'm a problem solver. I'm not there to agree with people. I'm there to articulate a point of view. Am I insistent and tenacious? Absolutely. I could not get this work done if I was not.”

“The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.”

“New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.”

“I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.”

“Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.”

“It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.”

“Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.”

“The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.”

“Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.”

“I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.”

“I've grown up a little bit. I understand the importance of the negotiation. It is a collective act.”