If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform.

Communication requires cultural context, and technology facilitates our ability to cross-reference ideas over time. Charles Moore were saying: Enough with the sterile, context-less architecture. Enough with the functional-minded frame of operation. How about a little mess? How about a little, let's say, syntax? A little quotation using history? How about some other meanings or symbols? I think that's the only logical reaction when you have to thoughtfully manage the communication of a lot of information.

In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints.

It is possible to construct small realities that contain political or philosophical responses, not necessarily just practical or economical responses.

As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do.

I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.

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.