When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives. To express spirituality, the architect has to think of the original material of architecture, space and light.

When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives. To express spirituality, the architect has to think of the original material of architecture, space and light.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

Ultimately it's the public nature of those projects that I most enjoy. Museums are more than just places to view art, they're also civic and social centers.

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.

The responsibility of an architect is to create a sense of order, a sense of place, a sense of relationship.

We look at each one [project] and consider the context - what it is and what it can be - beyond the strictly functional concerns.