If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.

Normally, architects render a service. They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.

Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings - sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.