The world has changed a great deal from when I began 50 years ago. I was very fortunate. There were a lot of opportunities that perhaps don't exist today.

When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.

Architecture which enters into a symbiosis with light does not merely create form in light, by day and at night, but allow light to become form.

Whiteness allows the architectural ideas to be understood most clearly - the difference between opacity and transparency, solid and void, structure and surface. These things are more perceptible in a white environment. They have a greater clarity.

The work needs to have a certain longevity. It lasts longer than we do.

For me [ Giovanni Lorenzo ] Bernini, [Francesco ] Borromini, and [Donato] Bramante have been as significant as Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn. I still marvel at their works, which have a quality and a timelessness that I seek to have in our projects.

I was in Taiwan recently and was completely amazed by the density of population. It makes New York look like no one is out on the streets.