Buildings are always better than drawings and models.

Growing up, you always heard of cops beating people up behind buildings and letting them go. Now they just shoot them.

Most buildings, whether they're Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time.

And imagine where we'd be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German.

I'm scared of high buildings.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

Buildings are forms of performances.

Don't say 'the White House wants.' Buildings can't want.

I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can't see in buildings and cars.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

Some of my best friends are architects. And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings.