Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

Every year I spend one month just sailing, but I still work when Im on the boat. You never separate work from leisure. A boat is like a magic world, like a little island.

Knowing how to do things not just with the head, but with the hands as well: this might seem a programmatic and ideological goal. It is not. It is a way of safeguarding creative freedom.

If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

Light has not just intensity, but also a vibration, which is capable of roughening a smooth material, of giving a three-dimensional quality to a flat surface.