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.

If you look at the polling around climate change in this country before 'Sandy', that was kind of the low point in terms of Americans believing that climate change was real and that humans were causing it.

I feel privileged to be a U.N. ambassador. It gives me an opportunity to use my voice to help raise awareness about important social and environmental issues.

Some argue that now isn't the time to push the green agenda - that all efforts should be on preventing a serious recession. That is a false choice. It fails to recognise that climate change and our carbon reliance is part of problem - high fuel prices and food shortages due to poor crop yields compound today's financial difficulties.

Do you care about climate justice? Are you about women's rights and women's reproductive rights? Do you care about civil liberties and the Voting Rights Act? There are so many opportunities for people to go back and be inspired and plug into their own community.