The architect Borromini's Quattro Fontane, a little church in Rome, is one of the most beautiful rooms in history.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the market­place responds to the public's needs and desires.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

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.

Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.