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

The architecture per se isn't at fault. The more important factor, in my view, is the political neglect of these areas, which have essentially been cut off from other neighborhoods.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

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

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.

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

Find optimism in the inevitable.