I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity and inequality, even passion and opportunity.
I don’t want to do architecture that’s dry and dull.
I don’t make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.
My buildings are all on budget.
My father probably – he had flashes of creativity – he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.
Well, I’ve always just – I’ve never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.
I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client’s needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.
I don’t think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can’t stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can’t live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff – mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.
I don’t know how to overcome this perception that I’m extravagant.
Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. ‘The client made me do this.’ ‘The city made me do this.’ ‘Oh, the budget.’ I don’t believe that anymore.
Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work – though not consciously.
Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.
And I realized, when I’d come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I’d just landed from Mars. But I couldn’t do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.
I can’t just decide myself what’s being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.
On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.
In an ideal world, pressure should come from below and from the top.
Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.
Democracy is a problem and we don’t want to get rid of it.
You can’t ignore history; you can’t escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.