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.

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.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.

We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

We're physiologically wired differently.

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.