I find it very dangerous to be talking about environmental problems as if the material itself is good or bad. Materials all come from the earth: it's how the human interacted with the material, and how they sourced it. That's where the energy consumption takes place, whether it is done in a small scale or a big scale, etc.

Not looking at materials [as] external to ourselves but from the lens of how humans interact with materials, and why time is the most underutilized resource. Or rather it's a resource we are all misusing—our lifetime on the earth. And the way we use our time is creating the problem rather than the solution.

If you look at pre-industrial architecture, we built architecture with any material. If there was mud you use mud. If there's wood you use wood. … If there's ice you use ice. There shouldn't be a material fetish which comes from a global sense of boredom.

There is a deep relationship of what you produce and where you produce it. In former times, luxurious architecture was defined not by the material and its cost but by how much time humans gave to it. To craft it—to ingeniously make bigger and bigger spans, taller and taller buildings—it's not the material that changed. … The things we made made us. So we evolved through the constraints we had. …

Human resource is infinite … our intelligence, our muscles, our memory, our care. … Natural resources are finite.