Young people go to university with the aim of becoming architects, of finding out if they have got what it takes. What is the first thing we should teach them?
'First of all, we must explain to them that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answers he already knows. Practising architecture is asking oneself questions, finding one's own answers with the help of the teacher, whittling down, finding solutions. Over and over again.

'The strength of a good design lies in ourselves and in our ability to perceive the world with both emotion and reason. A good architectural design is sensuous. A good architectural design is intelligent.

'We all experience architecture before we have even heard the word. The roots of architectural understanding lie in our architectural experience: our room, our house, our street, our village, our town, our landscape – we experience them all early on, unconsciously, and we subsequently compare them with the countryside, towns and houses we experience later on. The roots of our understanding of architecture lie in our biography. Students have to learn to work consciously with their personal biographical experiences of architecture.'
(Peter Zumthor, 1996)

A description, by a former pupil, of a Scarpa lesson:
'My encounter with Carlo Scarpa goes back to my student days. Mine was the generational privilege of hearing him speak ex cathedra, or even more of seeing him, for his expressiveness went far beyond words alone. As a lecturer he made a deep impression on me, and I shall never forget his account of how he solved the problem of displaying the Syracuse Annunciation at the exhibition of paintings by Antonello da Messina. Scarpa explained that this painting was so fragmented that the surviving pieces tended to be viewed separately from one another. Harsh lighting would have produced an undesirable clinical ef fect, making viewing like an autopsy. The light filtering through the window in the exhibition hall was a pitiless white, showing up the shreds of that glorious painting and making it harder to respond to the cold tones of the landscape and the severe construction of the interior. Weaving his hand about as if to make us feel the impalpable lightness of a drapery, the lecturer described how he had gone out to a haberdasher s and bought a nylon underskirt, very lightly tinted. This he set, at a suitable distance, between the exterior light and the window drapery, so that the light was mellowed without being dimmed.
Dean Hawkes The Architect and the Academy arq 4/1 2000

As architects we are privileged to work with the physical world - with materials, brick,
stone, wood, glass, metal, with forms and with light. We do not deal in speculation
about, or observation of, the physical world but with the very stuff itself.
David Chipperfield Theoretical Practice (1994)