In a strange way, architecture is really an unfinished thing, because even though the building is finished, it takes on a new life. It becomes part of a new dynamic: how people will occupy it, use it, think about it.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it.

When you're a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don't get fed up too easily.

And, yes, I love the process of building.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.