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.

You never build the perfect building. Only Allah is perfect. Life is such. You make decisions on conclusions, then some guy invents something else and the world changes. That's comforting. There's no one way to use museums, no one way to do art. That also means there is no one way to build museums.

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

Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

When you agree to collaborate, you agree to jump off a cliff holding hands with everyone, hoping the resourcefulness of each will insure that you all land on your feet.

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

I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.