There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.

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

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings.

Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

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