Your best work is your expression of yourself.

I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.

There are places that are so designed they're unlivable.

It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.

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.

Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.