Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

I was in the most restricted prison in China, the most tough. The design of the prison is modeled for internal crimes of the Communist party, so it's like a mafia family's law. It's independent to the law this nation openly applies. It's the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.

Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

If you just turn to your paper or television each day, there are thousands of stories that are much more shocking than the gallery artworks.

If civil society has nobody who protects the law, then what kind of society is that?

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.