I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

The good is not a category that interests me.

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