In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.

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.

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.

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.

Whoever educates himself and improves his own morals & character is superior to the man who tries to teach & train others.

It is possible to find the passion to read.

Sleeping is forbidden at the age of 22. It's all work and no play.

Whom drink made wits, though nature made them fools.

The next day the two sisters went to the ball, and so did Cinderella, but dressed more magnificently than before. The King's son was always by her side, and his pretty speeches to her never ceased.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.

Nothing is so high and above all danger that is not below and in the power of God. [Lat., Nihil ita sublime est, supraque pericula tendit Non sit ut inferius suppositumque deo.]

Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.