Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the market­place responds to the public's needs and desires.

It's not elitist to acknowledge that everyone has a unique signature and everyone is different.

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.