"You've got to bumble forward into the unknown."
"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."
"Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head."
"And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time."
"For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it."
"Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city."
"I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going."
"An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that."
"I work from the inside out."
"Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously."
"Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore."
"There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling."
"Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that."
"My buildings are all on budget."
"When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also."
"If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it."
"A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic."
"Democracy, obviously, is something we don't want to give up, but it does create chaos. It means the guy next door can do what he wants, and it creates a collision of thinking. In cities, that means people build whatever they want."
"This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off."
"I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope."
"I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form."
"When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies."
"I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture."
"Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that."
"You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature."
