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" I'm a leftie, and I've always believed in doing things on a modest scale. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them. "

" 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. "

" My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies. "

" It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. "

" I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not. "

" 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 promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80. "

" One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "

" My buildings are all on budget. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that. "

" Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible. "

" I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible. "

" I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for. "

" My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself. "

" 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. "

" Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. "

" There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up. "

" On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder. "

" I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull. "

" Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You've got to bumble forward into the unknown. "

" I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings. "

" 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. "

" 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. "