Renzo Piano Architect Quotations

I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony

When a man is not satisfied with a house where he lives, he becomes an architect

Architects have to dream, we have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well.

Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated in the best sense of the word – fed, fertilised by many things.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.