Elizabeth Diller

"We were kind of arrogant when we started and became really humbled as we were doing architecture. It's really hard to work with budgets and deadlines and all of these collaborators and all of these voices and special interests."

"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."

"In art school, it was about feeling. In architecture school, it was about ideas."

"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."

"We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body."

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

"As a student, I hadn't really been interested in architecture at all, but when I started teaching, it grew into me - rather than me growing into it."

"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."

"We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public."

"When I was studying architecture in the 1970s, it was intellectually bankrupt."