For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.

On the best days, I stop pleading, stop bargaining and watch-checking and fall into a rhythm so satisfying that I simply forget I’m working. So much of my writing day feels like well-digging. Sometimes I dig 200ft down before coming back up, dry. Every day I search for water.

Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. … Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.

Running CiRA with some 250 staff, I have come to spend less time discussing their data with my colleagues and students, and have been absorbed by my duties as the "chief executive officer" of CiRA, including devising strategies to advance both basic and applied research and to obtain sufficient funding. Anxious about the lack of financial resources for the future to allow us to continue hiring research support staffers, I even ran the full Kyoto Marathon in 2012 to raise online donations from the public. It was hard but helped us raise more than 10 million yen.

Unfortunately. And it’s mostly a made-up story. It was incredible to see how it was created here. All over the news: Muslim rage or whatever. The rioting was not about being Muslim. These people have not been able to integrate. So if they have a crisis of identity, it’s forced upon them. If, after three generations of living in France, Arabs are still called Arabs and not French, then of course they will be angry. People ask why the Arabs don’t consider themselves French. Well, it’s because the French don’t consider them French. Then you had the Ministry of the Interior talking about cleaning the scum off the street. That doesn’t justify the violence—they don’t have the right to burn cities—but it explains what happened.