The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.

I mean, making simulations of what you're going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you've gone wrong and what you can do about it.

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.

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.

When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.

All matter/space has some degree of "self" in it, and this self, or anyway some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical.

But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.