I do my best to choose carefully. If I don’t feel that collaboration is going to happen, I say no. Think about it. These projects can involve a five-to-seven-year partnership. If you don’t feel comfortable with someone, you can’t get rid of them. I just walked away from a job for that reason. Every one of these projects is an emotional investment, like falling in love. You’ve got to believe in it and you’ve got to like the people you work with.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

Everything - design and technology and materials - has changed since the World Trade Center was built. A lot of it has to do with computers, which allow us to be far more efficient as well as structurally sound.

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.

There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.