A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

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.

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.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

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.