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.

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

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

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.

When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.

My relationship to plants becomes closer and closer. They make me quiet; I like to be in their company.