Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

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

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

I'm a do-gooder liberal.

The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.