It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

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

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.

I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.