The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.