I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away.

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?