"One of the effects of the lottery bonanza has been to create a group of clients with great ambition but little building experience."

"Getting things built is difficult enough when everyone knows the score and is being paid properly to do their bit."

"A cynic might note that when things go wrong, and everybody involved in the actual building has a bloody miserable time of it, it is business as usual for our colleagues in the legal profession."

"I am cleverer than a whippet."

"Design and Build is fine for those who know precisely what they want, but are not too particular as to what they get."

"I'm not very good with light"

"Mistakes are valuable guides: they should not be forgotten or concealed. Rocks and reefs are chartered on maps as a warning to sailors - shouldn't we do the same with our mistakes and failures?"

"It takes an architect to think up the problems which can only be solved by an engineer. Which is why I find life so complex."

" ... sunglasses are the exemplary modern product, a neat synthesis of redundant technology and frivolous fashion, functional and irrational all at the same time."

"Christmas is a design calamity. Form and function are at odds: symbol and substance go veering off on madly divergent vectors."

"They always have oval heads and are wholly intent on using the space the architect has so thoughtfully provided."

"The house was designed to satisfy the growing trend for contemporary living with a minimalist approach to interior design and use of modular furniture."

"The main criticisms were poor ventilation, noise from surrounding buildings and the media attention on the project."

"It’s surprising how well the building works, once people surrender to its limitations." ... about Mies van der Rohe’s Berlin Art Gallery.

"A sustainable school is one that turns into a chiropody clinic over seventy years."

"Don't call me ubiquitous. You can say I'm crap. But don't say I'm ubiquitous."

"When they start demolishing your life's work, it is a depressing experience buit it shouldn't be. "

"Space is a medium of communication that tells you immediately how unimportant you are."

"Kitsch-me-quick housing estates "

Q: Does the creation of design admit constraints? A: Design depends largely on constraints.

"Five per cent of the (UK) construction industry is world class. The rest is crap."

"Architects understand technology as metaphors."

"Jack's courses are like hot-air dryers in toilets. They are a good idea but take too long."

"In my experience low maintenance means impossible to maintain."

"All you learn from prototypes is that most changes for the better turn out to be for the worst."

"They're part of the reason that things are ugly, but don't realise it."

"Originality and innovative potential are more important than the actuality of its performance."

"Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build"

"It's a no-win situation, a competition, except that, obviously, somebody does"

"If God is in the detail, Ikea is on the atheistical side of agnostic."

"Meanwhile it's a relief to know that the people who might be to blame are not in fact to blame."

"The problem with assumptions is that we always assume they are right."

"To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy."

"I think it's impossible to live in a room which isn't at least 13 feet tall. Don't you?"

"The necessities were going by default to save the luxuries until I hardly knew which were necessities and which luxuries."

"A system without feedback is stupid. You keep making the same old mistakes rather than interesting new ones."

"The best way to understand old buildings is to talk to old people. Unfortunately the old people we need to talk to are so old they have been dead for a long time. Hence, we have to use a new tool unknown in the Internet age—books—and really old ones that are typically written in some language other than English by some long dead European."

"The first time I saw the Rietveld Schroder House I keeled over and broke my ankle in excitement."

"The house builders' biggest mistake is making their houses too big. Very few are small and compact. Most people tend to build 15 to 25 per cent bigger than they need. It's a sort of disease".

"Architecture in Britain is becoming a culturally reductive retrovirus."

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

"Good design is about problem-solving under constraints - design has to have a goal of achieving some purpose."

"... big windows mean big problems"

"Building regulations!? What do you mean building regulations!?? Where do you get these from?"

"Is there anything you do that's not sustainable?"

"We can't really demolish it until we finish building it."

"In the UK, post-occupancy evaluation is about people and making their lives better at lower cost to all. In the US it seems to be more about product validation."

"This is a luvvies award - an award for doing it, not for doing it well."

"In geographical parlance, the built environment produces space-time; it is naturalized as the taken-for-granted and normal. This means that changing the built environment is as much a social and psychological challenge as it is a physical and financial one. "

"I can't see any clouds on the horizon. I assume they're there, though."

"First see that the design is wise and just; that ascertained; pursue it resolutely."

"I've seen many low-carbon designs but hardly any low-carbon buildings."

"It is easier to introduce new complications than resolve the old ones."

"Designers know too much about the equipment to make a good user interface. It is hard to be ignorant when you know so much."

"I have tried minimalism and it stinks."

"... This is such a crucial point for us as designers - don’t struggle to reconcile impossible criteria, reframe the brief upstream".

"At all costs we must learn to avoid self-imposed constraints."

"The key to success is being able to save some contingency - but whatever you do, don't call it that."

"At first, people grinned and mugged and went "Whoa!", as ferry passengers do when first coming to terms with the swell. But after a few minutes of being unable to walk without your legs crossing under you like a pair of scissors, it became annoying. Tony (Caro), Norman (Foster) and Ove (Arup), we said to ourselves, come and explain to us again how this thing is supposed to work. "

"The case for vapour open materials needs to be stated much more strongly, with stronger warnings of the dangers of plastic insulation."