Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

Even a beautiful piece of work can be overshadowed, destroyed, by something else.

I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.

I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.

In northern architecture - the cathedrals of Europe and all the little churches - the details, the carving of stone, become necessary because the light is not there to help you very much. You have to enrich surfaces. The desert reduces form to its simplest nature. There is no need for gargoyles or flying buttresses in the desert.

I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.