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You think about D.C. as a boring stuffy place. That's kind of its image. But if you grow up in that, you see all these energetic, fun people and crazy stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one knows about.

Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.

The Eisenhower Building - the furniture is mismatched; everything is just bad decor and bad quality. Everybody's looking down at their Blackberry. It's a really frantic, mismatched environment. But on the exterior, it's this whitewashed, gorgeous building. It's a fascinating contrast.

My architecture tends to be legible, light and flexible. You can read it. You look at a building, and you can see how it is constructed. I put the structure outside.

It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.

Architecture has curled up in a ball and it's about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you're not sure if it's good or bad but at least it's interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.

NASA is an utterly fascinating place, and the fact that the buildings look so anonymous almost makes it more fascinating. You walk by a generic office-park-looking building, and you have no idea what's going on inside.

When you're in a place like New York or D.C. you just can't beat it, and it's so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places.