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There are so many constraints on the architect that public buildings almost never feel free or enjoyable.

Architecture is not a profession for the faint-hearted, the weak-willed, or the short-lived.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

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.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

It's sad to see these old buildings go because they have so many memories, and it's a real personal kind of thing when you play these places. It's part of our history just gone.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

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.