Jimenez Lai Quotes

#1. The obsession was so real and so prolonged. Sleeping was kind of like taking breaks from continuing the obsession.

Jimenez Lai

#2. Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities.

Jimenez Lai

#3. The world is meaningless and therefore it's funny.

Jimenez Lai

#4. I think of architecture as language, and I look within the intra-communication between architects.

Jimenez Lai

#5. In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints.

Jimenez Lai

#6. I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact.

Jimenez Lai

#7. I see architecture as a form of communication over time.

Jimenez Lai

#8. In some cases there are ways of thinking about what an architectural program produces - interior and exterior - that is not necessarily directed by an economic requirement, but is a diagram based on human actions, selfish or otherwise.

Jimenez Lai

#9. The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better.

Jimenez Lai

#10. Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.

Jimenez Lai

#11. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds.

Jimenez Lai

#12. The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.

Jimenez Lai

#13. What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.

Jimenez Lai

#14. The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.

Jimenez Lai

#15. The idea of morphology of languages is something that I'm really interested in.

Jimenez Lai

#16. Morphology happens over time. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Jimenez Lai

#17. It is possible to construct small realities that contain political or philosophical responses, not necessarily just practical or economical responses.

Jimenez Lai

#18. Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.

Jimenez Lai

#19. I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds.

Jimenez Lai

#20. When I would present my work as a student, often I would hear, "Your project is too formal" - it's too form-based; it's too form-driven. Which is kind of shocking for a visual practice, for someone to say something discouraging about a focus on an exploration of aesthetics.

Jimenez Lai

#21. Aesthetics is both politics and philosophy, a series of agreements and disagreements between subjective minds.

Jimenez Lai

#22. As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do.

Jimenez Lai

#23. Setting up absurd worlds with rules to violate - it's one of the things I hope to achieve with my work.

Jimenez Lai

#24. Architectural drawing is a language with conventions where the rules can be deliberately misused; a well-composed architectural drawing can both contain correct and incorrect arrangements of meaningful things.

Jimenez Lai

#25. I think regionalism was a little easier before mass communication was made possible. This is not to say that regionalism doesn't exist anymore. I think it does.

Jimenez Lai

#26. The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either.

Jimenez Lai

#27. If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform.

Jimenez Lai

#28. Many artists I enjoy have a large body of work, and eventually the message is derived out from the sum of its parts.

Jimenez Lai

#29. It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over.

Jimenez Lai