a willingness to walk away from situations that he did not think would ultimately be to his professional benefit,

transcend conflict and through his architecture bring different forces into accord.

Great art, Stravinsky was saying, is not arbitrary; it emerges out of knowledge and discipline, and of new—daring—ways to work within the constraints of reality to make new kinds of order.

architectural playfulness

push the boundaries of architectural form so that they would embrace more of the concerns of art, but that was not the same as rejecting the concerns of architecture in favor of those of art.

capable of making imaginative shapes,

maker of three-dimensional compositions,

He wanted a small office, with little enough overhead that he could afford to focus on work he cared about.

a play of shapes, of solids and voids, of transparency and opacity, but it had to be just as much a dialogue between old and new, and between the ordinary and the extraordinary.