We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

We are shaped by our shaping of the world.

We build dwellings and thereafter they build us.

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

And what we imagine becomes what we build.

We're shaping software and the software is shaping us. It's a circle.

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Architects have the power to change the culture of how we build and how we think about resources.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

First we build the tools, then they build us.