“The tower does not represent any kind of opening-up. Look at Gothic architecture as an example. It’s like a praying hand. Still, people tend to forget that it is not about going upwards, but that all the weight in there is pressing downwards. Earth gravity is the dominant force in Gothic structures which is pure pressure. We live in a sphere, and everything falls towards the centre of the sphere because there is mass gravitation. So, there are weights in the structures. In the Romanesque or Gothic period, there is pure pressure in the structures, while they show an upward tendency in their form, but in reality there is pressure. If there is too much pressure on a cornerstone and the stone can no longer take it, some people say the stone suffers. (…) You have to distribute the forces in a structure in a way that they are distributed fairly and economically. The essence of architecture is statics itself, the play of forces that takes place in the building. In architecture (…) there are no metaphors, no symbols. If there are any, they appear only as subsystems of a system.”

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