I don't like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don't appear any different from those in the past.

I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden - the Forbidden City - and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial.

Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

2007, according to a Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans believed that climate change was real, that it was human caused.

I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.

I was interested in wildlife conservation, and I chose Georgia because they supposedly had a good forestry school. I figured it might be easier to get good grades there, too, because a lot of Southern kids would come up to school in New Jersey, and they'd always be a little behind, so I figured maybe I wouldn't have to work so hard.

Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.