Not everything needs to be recycled.

Honor commerce as the engine of change.

In planetary terms, we're all downstream.

If design is the first signal of human intention.

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.

I think the job of an original designer is to inspire.

How do we love all the children of all species for all time?

We are all born artists... Almost everything kids do is art.

We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.

Art is about going a little nuts... Kids do art for fun. It's playing.

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.

We get jealous not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us.

If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.

We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.

It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions.

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.

If you don't like carbon, if you want to be zero carbon, then you might as well shoot yourself, dry up and blow away because you are carbon.

You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

I see that idea that we need a new form as something critical. I mean, we do need to invent and not be benchmarking all the time. That's important to me.

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

I am working right at both the levels- with the most wealthy clients in the world, but also the poorest. I spend half my time designing for people that have nothing.

Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.

I just think it is so delightful to see people, let their elbows free. I think the exuberance of it all is really exciting to me. It's a signal of the abundance of diversity and creative expression.

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.

The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.

So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want.

I am very focused on large-scale deployments of renewable power and how we're going to get this done. Imagine our military bases covered with solar thermal collectors that could generate steam and electricity.

I can't imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it's destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it's not ecologically intelligent at this point?

We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.

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