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

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

"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."

"An intelligent building is one that doesn't make the occupants look stupid."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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"

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

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

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

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

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

"I have tried minimalism and it stinks."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"I am cleverer than a whippet."

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

"Kitsch-me-quick housing estates "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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. "

"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."

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

"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?"

"Architects understand technology as metaphors."

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

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

"... big windows mean big problems"

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

"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".