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.

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.

That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

For me, every day is a new thing.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.