I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

The multiplicity of ideas is what I'm interested in.

So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.

Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.

Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people.

I've been such an outsider my whole life.

I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

Find a place that you are comfortable with. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make a lot of mistakes.

I lived in a state of rage from 12 to 20. Until college, I was beyond an outsider. I was a voyeur of life.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

I think my clients would tell you I'm a problem solver. I'm not there to agree with people. I'm there to articulate a point of view. Am I insistent and tenacious? Absolutely. I could not get this work done if I was not.

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'

I've grown up a little bit. I understand the importance of the negotiation. It is a collective act.

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

There is no modern prototype for a campus. You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.

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.