"Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power. Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters."
"The most important thing, in order to forge one's own creative personality, is to travel, to see different environments, different cultures. I wanted to try to imagine a new kind of structure in architecture. In general, architects follow fashions. They're neoclassical, postmodern."
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More quotes by Shigeru Ban
"I believe that the material doesn’t need to be strong to be used to build a strong structure. The strength of the structure has nothing to do with the strength of the material."
"An architect does not need to spend his whole career making monuments for rich people."
"I'm not inventing anything new, I'm just using existing material differently."
"Architecture is not about designing somehting from a free, fanciful idea. It is about discovering and establishing one's own principle, some kind of regularity - finding an individual formula to apply to one's buildings."
"People are not killed by earthquakes alone, but by collapsed buildings."