My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.

I think you've got to accept that certain things are in process that you can't change, that you can't overwhelm. The chaos of our cities, the randomness of our lives, the unpredictability of where you're going to be in ten years from now - all of those things are weighing on us, and yet there is a certain glimmer of control. If you act a certain way, and talk a certain way, you're going to draw certain forces to you.

You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.

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.

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.