Yeah, it's not that I wanted to do a painting, I wanted to do writing like that. What jolted me about Jasper Johns was how important it is to start with a convention, how important it is to start with what everybody knows and everybody takes for granted, whether it's a number, an alphabet letter, a set of alphabet letters, a target.

Sometimes when you come from outside a discipline you pay attention to things that insiders take for granted. I admit that sometimes I feel hesitant in the midst of other architects. I can't help thinking that they know more than I do, but I also feel that maybe I can go in directions they learned you're not supposed to go in.

Modernism was a big thing for me, coming from a father who was very interested in art, music and culture - and almost always Italian art, music and culture. One good thing about Italians is that culture is part of everyday life. But Modernism is a movement of the past. The idea of a Modernist building as a sculpture set on a pedestal of grass is a part of Modernism that I'm not so crazy about.

Architecture is not about space but about time.

[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.

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.

[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it...)