Quote collection
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"I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character."
"If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?"
"I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is."
"Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think."
"It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it."
"For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn."
"Every memorial in its time has a different goal."
"I think I've always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me - and this is where some people just don't get it, or they'd prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder - I have this personality where I just want to put something out that's a fact and then let you interpret it. It's almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention."
"To fly, we must have resistance."
"I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make."
"You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things."
"I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on."
"war is not just a victory or loss ... People die."
"I can't shout out, "Do this." I don't want to be prescriptive. I want to give you facts, and that's the way I've always operated, whether it's a historical fact or a scientific fact, and then you actually have to connect it in your brain."
"The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning."
"I do think the smaller-scale studio works have that incredible love of data crunching, whereas I would say the large-scale earthworks tend to be much more stripped-down. With the mappings, as connected as they are to a much more analytical idea, what's a map? And can I make a map about time? I think the first time was Hurricane Sandy, the flood plane; a moment in time, but indelibly marked on any of us who were in the city. Mapping time is something that I'm really interested in."
"I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently."
"We know under Nebraska there is an underground aquifer that is probably underneath the whole state, but what form does it take? I kind of want to focus on that, for almost political means, because we keep digging more wells. We're not replenishing, and we're having a crisis in water around the world. But how do you visualize it? I don't know, so I know what I want to study."
"I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist."
"I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control."