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

We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories.

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

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.

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

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

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.