As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.

Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.