China came from a communist dictatorship of the ugliest kind to become a country which today has a smiling population. Things are getting better and better every day - you can feel it, you can touch it over here!

It is absolutely the central theme in my design philosophy - that life is erotic, period. The female body is one of the most extraordinary designs ever done in this universe.

An architect has to build the building from the inside out, not the outside in!

I learned to ask myself questions like: Why is something made the way it is? Why does a motorcar look like it does? Is it right or wrong? What is an airplane? Why is it shaped like that? Then, later, I became a diver and studied subaquatic life and the streamlining of sharks and manta rays. Any fish is superior to the shapes we humans have invented - and unchanged for 250 million years, imagine!

If I had been president, I would have come out and declared: "Nothing there, ever! This place stays as it is. We make a big place there where people can pray about the errors we have made that those two towers had to fall."

You see, if you are 30 years ahead of your time, you will always have difficulty speaking with the bosses in the industry. They are too conservative.

I'm a very peaceful man. In the '80s, I was the chief designer at Thyssen, one of the biggest companies in Germany. But when they asked me to design armored vehicles, tanks, and submarines, I quit overnight.