The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

Winning the Pritzker assures a flood of work in one's seventies and eighties, jobs necessarily carried out by assistants as the demands of modern-day cultural stardom and the inevitable waning of physical capacities prevent many architects from attaining the transcendent final phase more easily achieved by artists in other mediums.

Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.

Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.

Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.

Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.