Mario Botta

A museum is a spiritual place. People lower their voices when they get close to art.

Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.

Great architecture of the past was always clear. SFMOMA is still a simple building to understand.

In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.

To me it was fascinating, the idea of going to university and studying a subject - architecture - that I had already faced in building some small houses.

The Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio comes from afar. Our land has a millennial history of emigrations: master masons, architects, builders, decorators, plasterers, artists from the world of building.

Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man.

For me, architecture is not just creating a space to protect people but to make them dream as well.