Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.

Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.

If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.