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

The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work.

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

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten.

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.