Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.

It's too noisy near the surface. To be able to concentrate with all your being, you must shut out all distractions. You must listen with your soul.

It is a beautiful and scary thing to sit open-handed and let all your plans float away like dust.

I'll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.

The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

If we'd beaten 'em, I wouldn't be going out.

It is so hard trying to say what you mean.

I see things written about the golf swing that I can't believe will work except by accident .

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.