It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.

I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.

I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.

Nigeria was a blank on the map - there weren't even any maps. The US State Department, everyone said don't go there. It was courageous of Harvard University: the notion was that we would match Harvard students with Nigerian students, so that every student would have a guide, creating a guarantee of intimacy with the city.

Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.