If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything - the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.

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

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me."

I found the material that people hated the most and used the most. So, I was going and try and see if I could play with it sculpturally.

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.