If you focus on design, you can call yourself a designer. If you focus on the implementation of your design, you can call yourself an architect.

Ego gets you inches but it doesn't get you impact.

A career is a job you love, right? That's what a career should be. If you're in a job that you hate, you should quit. That's the way I look at it. I'm in a job that I love so I'm going to make it my career.

We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades.

For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect.

When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community and often the community socially is broken.

After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.