But I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.