"I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring."
"For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible."
"I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms."
"I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board."
"In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives."
"St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth."
"You can say, like, planet Earth has an existing geology, and what we do as human beings and as architects is that we try to sort of alter and modify and expand the geology."
"Sustainability can't be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge."
"Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings."
"In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way."
"Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house."
"In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority."
"New York is flat - it's ideal for bicycling."
"All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect."
"All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster."
"I almost never listen to the radio."
"My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them."
"The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth."
"Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects."
"I think the biggest backhanded criticism-compliment I get is that I'm 'good at communicating.' Which implies that you're bad at doing."
"The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn't mean that it's unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it's crystal-clear. And if you can't explain it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's so brilliant that ordinary mortals can't fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense."
"Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them."
"Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world."
"If I was misogynist, would I hire a woman as my CEO? Probably not. I grew up in Denmark, for crying out loud. Denmark is probably one of the places where equality is actually fully achieved. Our political system is practically a matriarchy."
"Maybe our work appeals to some people more than others. But the opportunities that I present to my colleagues are completely uninfluenced by gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion."
