Elizabeth Diller

“Architects typically inherit programmes or sites. We maybe twist the programme a little bit, bring our own invention into it, and we feel perfectly happy when we walk away. It doesn't feel like quite enough.”

“I have a real survivor's instinct.”

“I think idiosyncrasy is great.”

“We try to make buildings last long and be resilient but also be not so idiosyncratic that they can't change.”

“I don't really know what 'starchitect' means. I take it as a pejorative because it means that you're sought-after.”

“In a progressively privatised city, the defence of public space, the production of new public space, and saving what is public really for the public is very important.”

“I never thought I was going to be an architect in the conventional sense.”

“Architecture has been male-dominated forever, and I am a grateful beneficiary of the women's movement.”

“Being a New Yorker and someone that goes to MoMA as a patron, I want it to be good.”

“My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.”

“In my thesis, I made an intellectual exercise out of creating a pair of buildings that were a repeat but slightly different - dissonant things make me uncomfortable.”

“Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses.”

“I can't live without my 15-inch MacBook Pro. I drag it everywhere I go. I love having a big screen with me at all times, especially in transit.”

“Many tools are indispensable for my work, from a utility knife to parametric-modeling software, like Digital Project. But it's important not to confuse the tool for the content, as some designers under 30 do.”

“I hate digital calendars, so I use pen and paper or the palm of my hand for my daily schedule. I get much more satisfaction out of physically crossing things out than deleting.”

“Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology.”

“Architecture, by definition, is always standing still.”

“In the 1970s, New York was known as a place of great artistic production. Slowly, my city went from a place of production to a place of consumption.”

“We like to take impossible things and actually make them happen.”

“I was a rebel. I never wanted to build. We thought of architecture as intellectually bankrupt and slightly corrupt, and I was always more interested in other forms of discourse.”