The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.

Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

I abhor the word "consumer." Consumers, unlike citizens, have no implicit duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the common good. It's a degrading term. The use of it degrades the public discussion.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.

I believe our techno-zealotry will be moderated by sheer circumstance. We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what our fantasies propose.