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

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.

I didn't have any interest in doing rich people's homes. I still don't.

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.