There are places that are so designed they're unlivable.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

Some cultures tried to stop people from expressing themselves. In Mao's China, for example, the Communists tried to stop individual expression. For them the payoff was a society of equality. The problem of course is that it didn't work.