“Four hours after leaving Kornah, we passed the reputed tomb of Ezra th...” — Isabella Bird Quote

Four hours after leaving Kornah, we passed the reputed tomb of Ezra the prophet. At a distance and in the moonlight it looked handsome. There is a buttressed river wall, and above it some long flat-roofed buildings, the centre one surmounted by a tiled dome.

The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.

The plantations in the Hilo district enjoy special advantages, for by turning some of the innumerable mountain streams into flumes, the owners can bring a great part of their cane and all their wood for fuel down to the mills without other expense than the original cost of the woodwork.

The 'Desert' sweeps up to the walls of Baghdad, but it is a misnomer to call the vast level of rich, stoneless, alluvial soil a desert. It is a dead flat of uninhabited earth; orange colocynth balls, a little wormwood, and some alkaline plants which camels eat, being its chief products. After the inundations, reedy grass grows in the hollows.

I happen to love buildings, and my passion is bringing people together.

What the people are within, the buildings express without.

Often the art in New York is related to the buildings, to grandiose things.

We have been developing an ever closer relationship with China on climate change for many years which has led to collaboration on carbon trading, offshore wind development, on low-carbon buildings, on nuclear energy, and on carbon capture and storage - to name just some of the ways in which we're working together.

From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.