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" Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people. "

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" Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel. "

" When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn't get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead. "

" The way a human can coexist with nature has to be at the spiritual level. "

" Although we're architects, we believe we do culture; architecture is culture, and the topics we tackle will always arise a broader debate. "

" There must be a way to combine the high rise and high-density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky. "

" China has some cities, traditional cities, with a long history. They are so beautiful, and they were planned so smartly. I call them gardens on the city scale. For example, Beijing has mountains, waters, lakes, bridges, towers. It was a very poetic city. "

" I treat my projects as art. "

" Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture? "

" We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements. "

" When I started university, I didn't know much about architecture, so I flipped through a lot of magazines, looking at different and exciting images from all over the world. I thought that architecture could be interesting. "

" The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment. "

" I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure. "

" China is a place where you can experience two very contrasting things coexisting. First, the rich, cultural history of the country - and, second, rapid urbanization. "

" The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness. "

" Tiananmen Square is a sensitive topic because many things happened there. The idea of turning the plaza into a forest makes many people feel uncomfortable. "

" I actually feel like a very traditional architect. "

" A lot of ancient poetry sees in nature a reflection of human emotions, and in a post-industrialized era, once people have become more aware of the necessity of a more harmonious relation between man and nature, we need to build cities which can connect with human spiritual needs instead of being merely functional. "

" A door handle is very symbolic to me. It is the first object that one will interact with before entering a new space. "

" To allow millions of people to live together on limited land, we have to go to the sky; we have to build a high rise. But we can still build nature and social space into the towers. Each family can have their own courtyard in the sky. "

" I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden - the Forbidden City - and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial. "

" A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape. "

" Architects think that beauty is a crime. "

" People love to go closer to nature and other people, so we need to create environments that let people have these emotional connections. "

" I think where traditional values are concerned, Chinese people see nature as very symbolic. It's a form of culture. "

" I don't use tools to create things, but I use them to realize things. "

" Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history. "

" In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning - not only as a landscape but a part of daily life. "

" Oscar Niemeyer really inspired me. He's from South America, where nature has meaning. And his architecture was not expensive or high tech but artistic and spiritual. I like that. "

" The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response. "

" When you look at classical structures, they're often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it's not something standard that you can copy. "