Quotes by Tadao Ando

"My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process."

"There is a role and function for beauty in our time."

"You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you."

"When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space."

"Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture."

"You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see."

"When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan."

"Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture."

"All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space."

"I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world."

"When I draw something, the brain and the hands work together."

"I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future."

"All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment."

"Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two."

"Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture."