"I was roughly thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old when I did [the Chicago Civic Center], and architecture is kind of an old man's game because of all of the things that you have to do. But if you look at all of the work that I've done over the years, I've done relatively few buildings just to be doing buildings. Somebody said to me--we were standing on the plaza, right after the building was dedicated and occupied---they said, 'Jacques, it's going to be pretty hard to do anything after this, isn't it?' And I said, 'Yes. An opportunity like this only comes once in your lifetime."

Jacques Calman Brownson
(b. 1923)