As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.

Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.