Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.
I am always surprised by how much little emphasis schools of architecture, and indeed, many architects, place on the process of the mating of a building.
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."
Because, if we understand how a building is to be produced and we find a way that it can be more simply produced, then obviously we are contributing to building better buildings more easily.
Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.
Normally, architects render a service. They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.
Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich.
