Interviewer: What do you think of the women in Vancouver?
AE: They are rather fashionless. I don’t think they take advantage of their beauty. I think in general they are handsome, but they look dowdy and ill-kempt as though they just got out of bed. The men appear to lack adventure in their minds. I think people here are indifferent to morality. It is a very amoral place and it is a kind of climate that sponsors amorality and [in reaction to this, on the other side,] you have a lot of prudishness. People here are easygoing. Very casual. Very lax in maintaining social responsibilities. Their 
friendships are not deep but they are very friendly. The Swedish people are the same. In the winter they hibernate. I think the same thing happens here.
Interviewer: That is a summation of your students?
AE: I find the same thing.
***
AE: (speaking of civic pride) I think there is an artificial pride here. People are proud of their mountains, proud of the site and certainly this is the most beautiful site of any city besides Rio. You can’t really be proud of something that nature has done, you have to be proud of what you have done and we have not done justice yet. I intend to stay because the potential is fantastic and because there are so few places left in the world with this emergent aspect.
Interviewer: What do you see in Simon Fraser [University]?
AE: We haven’t had time to develop the initial ideas. We were thrown almost from a cartoon into working drawings without going into a lot of soul-searching as to how this should evolve. Therefore I think we lost a lot. We haven’t had time for the refinement, the development. It is a monumental scheme. It is going to be the one monumental thing that people in Vancouver will see. They have never seen anything like it and probably never will again. It will have great spaces which I felt were important — in scale to the landscape and the site. It will unfortunately be rough, brutal, and I feel that it is better to be rough and brutal in the materials and in the way it is built, rather than to pretend refinements, when there hasn’t been time to apply these. It will be as I think architecture should be in this city — down to earth, rank, open, no nonsense, applying itself with as much harmony as possible to its setting and to the climate and within itself and also something that takes the human out of his ordinary, human fire-side existence. Ennobles him, lifts him.
