[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult.

I came from the time of so-called New Criticism - the poem in itself, the writing in itself - but around that time I had come across a critic called Kenneth Burke, who wrote a book called A Rhetoric of Motives, and it seemed to talk about another way, and gradually I realized that other way was that the reader made a difference.

Everybody uses labels: they give you a handle on things - an over-simplified handle, sure, but without labels, without ads, without words, the world would be an indistinguishable mass, a blur. You can hope, maybe, that people ascribe so many labels to you that none wins out

Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.

What I never wanted in art - and why I probably didn't belong in art - was that I never wanted viewers. I think the basic condition of art is the viewer: The viewer is here, the art is there. So the viewer is in a position of desire and frustration. There were those Do Not Touch signs in a museum that are saying that the art is more expensive than the people. But I wanted users and a habitat. I don't know if I would have used those words then, but I wanted inhabitants, participants. I wanted an interaction.

When a building is so complete within itself, I always think, "Why do I even have to go inside it?" I would love to do architecture that people can have a free hand in the making of it. We've done spaces where things are hinged and they can go out or in, but that's not freedom. That's supermarket freedom, or the notion that you can have anything you want as long as the supermarket carries it. We would love to do a space where you go inside and there's nothing there. You might have a seat and when you don't need it anymore you get up and it disappears.

Sustainability has become a religion in architecture - not that there's anything wrong with it - but I think it has to work both ways. Everyone thinks architecture has to be subservient to sustainability, but what if we thought in the other direction, like, what can sustainability do to make architecture more exciting?