Silence
In my gardens, in my houses, I have always tried to deprive the placid murmur of silence, and in my sources the silence sings.
Loneliness
Only in intimate communion with loneliness can man find himself. She is a good companion, and My architecture is not for whom the subject and shuna.
Serenity
It is the great and true antidote against anguish and fear, and today, the man's room must cause it. In my projects and in my works it has not been my constant eagerness, but you have to take care that an indiscriminate colored palette does not have the scarce. The architect has to announce in his work the gospel of serenity.
Happiness
How to forget it! I think that a work reaches perfection when the emotion of joy, silent and serene joy enjoyed in solitude does not exclude.
Death
The certainty of our death is a source of lifeand in religiosity implicit in the work of art triumphs life over death.
Grounds
In the garden the architect invites us to collaborate with the plant kingdom. A beautiful garden is a permanent presence of naturebut nature reduced to human proportion and put at the service of man, and is the most effective refuge against the aggressiveness of the contemporary world.
«The soul of the gardens,» said Ferdinand Bac, «houses the greatest sum of serenity that man can arrange.» And it was Bac who woke up in me the yearning for garden architecture. He said: «In this small domain (its gardens of Les Colombiers) I have done nothing but join the millenary solidarity than that we are all subject, which is nothing but the ambition to express with matter a common feeling to many men in search of a link with nature by creating a place of rest, of peaceful pleasure.» It is already seen that it is a condition of a garden to combine the poetic and the mysterious with the serenity of joy. There is no better expression of vulgarity than a vulgar garden.
In a vast lava extension south of Mexico City I proposedarrobated by the beauty of that old volcanic landscape, make some gardens that will humanizewithout destroying such a wonderful show. Walking among the lava cracks protected by the shadow of imposing living rock walls, I suddenly discovered. Oh lovely surprise! Small secrets green valleys surrounded and limited by the most capricious, beautiful and fantastic stone formations that had been sculpted in the melted rock of the breath of prehistoric storms.
So unexpected finding of these valleys produced a non -unbalanced feeling that I had when, walking through a narrow and dark tunnel of the Alhambra, I gave me, serene, quiet and lonely, the beautiful courtyard of the myrtles of that old palace. Contained what a well -achieved garden should contain: No less than the entire universe. He has never abandoned such memorable epiphany and it is no accident that since the first garden I made in 1941, all those who have followed him with humility to collect the echo of the immense lesson of the plastic wisdom of the Moors of Spain.