On the everyday:
I believe it is safe to say that most architecture is not very good. Most good architecture is good enough for most days. But some buildings, some architecture should rise above the everyday. This necessarily challenges us to return to the significance of the everyday, to enrich it and revalidate it through the totality of the things we build.

I try to look at the world with a microscopic wide angle lens to generate ideas and actions from concrete experiences of the everyday. Observations of micro and macro conditions -- biological, geological, and cultural -- form the basis of inspiration and deep possibilities for making. This is an inductive, bottom up process that allows us to amplify the small things that manifest the large things.

On the responsibilities of the profession:
Contributions toward the fundamental civic dignity in our world are easily lost in the miasma, and the lives of citizens, far less ennobled by our efforts in the realm of the everyday than they should demand, are lived instead in the comforts of privatized worlds on the internet or in automobiles. Architecture imbued with local specificity and invention eludes us, only to be taken up uncritically by the purveyors of a nostalgic historicism or a soulless technological functionalism.

I believe we can invigorate the culture of the everyday object, as well as the discipline, by simply building well. In effect, I mean to enrich and provide dignity tot he day-to-day experience of being in the world for all those who engage the totality of the things we make. I hope architecture will retain its resolve in shaping our empathy with the world.