Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.

I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

We know under Nebraska there is an underground aquifer that is probably underneath the whole state, but what form does it take? I kind of want to focus on that, for almost political means, because we keep digging more wells. We're not replenishing, and we're having a crisis in water around the world. But how do you visualize it? I don't know, so I know what I want to study.