Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.

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.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

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

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.