Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.

There are geologists who can pick up a rock and say, 'Yes, there's oil under there.' A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.

Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.

Yet still, there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly-when all our forces are resolved. A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves, even. When we know these moments, when we smile, when we are not on guard at all-these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever it is you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it-for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed.