The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.

That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

People are searching for something they don't have in their lives. There's an unfulfilled need.

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.

Cardboard is another material that's ubiquitous and everybody hates, yet when I made furniture with it everybody loved it.

The back of Saint Peter's is one of the finest pieces of architecture I've ever seen.