At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I'm not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.
If you're into architecture and you're from the West, everything is hors d'oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you're led there. You can't escape it.
You can just drift unhappily towards this vision of heaven on earth, and ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of: Heaven on earth, at it's best.
I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.
But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.
You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.
The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.
