My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It...

You could never hide yourself in these places – in Mies’s Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.

That’s what I love about Chicago… It is the staccato aspect of the skyscrapers. But the ground is very loose, very relaxed. It makes Chicago far more pleasant than other cities.

I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.

In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright – and you can also see it with Mies – they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the...