I pushed the process forward by saying, 'We should do this, this, and this right now. Please find the budget for me to find a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, so we can do the preliminary work.

When I was in the Army, the unit I served in, you could never stop. It was a volunteer unit, and there was a fairly high rate of attrition. The people who stayed through are the people who were either great at it or the people who just didn't know how to stop. And I fell into that second category.

How do you design it so that people can form a space of their own, and feel quiet and contemplative?

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

There are bound to be differences in any artistic collaboration with landscape elements, or theater, of lighting elements.

You can just never desist. You have to always push back, whatever the pressures put on you.

I love New York, but I'd felt like an outsider here.