I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.

Cardboard is another material that's ubiquitous and everybody hates, yet when I made furniture with it everybody loved it.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.

I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.

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.

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.