Thom Mayne

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

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

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.

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

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.

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.

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'

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.

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

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.

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.

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.