The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better.

I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.

Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities.

What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.

Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.

I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds, and in our case, the realities we create can be as real as concrete. These kinds of ideas, of wild imagination, go into the question of how you make a world.

In some cases there are ways of thinking about what an architectural program produces - interior and exterior - that is not necessarily directed by an economic requirement, but is a diagram based on human actions, selfish or otherwise.