When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

But now, more and more, its society is concerned with economy and finance.

The level of detail and craft is something that's inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.

When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.

You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.

But in Japan, there's nothing like that, since the temple is made of wood. The divine spirit inside the building is eternal, so the enclosure doesn't have to be.

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

I don't look so closely at women's fashion, but from the 20th century on, people have had the freedom to express themselves and their individualities, and fashion is one of the most fundamental ways in which they do this, men and women are equally able to express themselves.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.

I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.

When I draw something, the brain and the hands work together.

I hope America can also be the cultural leader of the world, and use this frontier spirit to lead and show others that we need courage to go places where we have not gone before.

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

You always want to try to make something new, and, of course, America is the world leader in economics today.

At the same time, I would add that the American people have a lot of courage.

You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you.

In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it's a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside.

The computer offers another kind of creativity. You cannot ignore the creativity that computer technology can bring. But you need to be able to move between those two different worlds.

I hope that America as a whole, and especially its architects, will become more seriously involved in producing a new architectural culture that would bring the nation to the apex - where it has stood before - and lead the world.

My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.

There is a role and function for beauty in our time.

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.

I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.

If there is only one culture all over the world, that's not a good thing.

In Japan, there is less a culture of preserving old buildings than in Europe.

Working in Tokyo has convinced me that, contrary to what people think, it is actually one of the world's most beautiful cities.

There are self-made millionaires - their aspiration is first to make money. But the once that goal is achieved, they have to look for something and sometimes they become patrons of art or museums. And that is how the world should go.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Architecture in general is frozen music.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.

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.