Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

I try to do everything from thinking about big issues like how a building fits into the larger stream of architectural history to practical issues such as how it feels to navigate your way through its interior.

Wright's building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.

The taste of people with large bank accounts tends not to be on the cutting edge.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?

Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.

The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are architecture.

I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.