You can make people feel valued or cared for by design alone. It's not purely about money. It's about how we choose to value human experience.
I try to be a positive person, but I'm also always looking and wondering, 'Maybe this could be done differently.' As soon as your mind is in a critical mode, you're halfway through designing; as soon as you start thinking about whether something could be better, you're already halfway through a solution.
Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.
I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways.
Our job is to get people in, create the spaces, and then get out of the way.
Ambition is a form of creativity.
I don't feel I'm trying to make art. I'm trying to make interesting things. People can relate to that.
An interest in ideas is a sign of human life. People are fascinated by what the future is going to be - and the future is going to be an accumulation of ideas.
I used to say I'm not a business. I'm not! But I've had to come round to it, to acknowledge that you had to be an organisation and had to have a business dimension in order to do your passion.
At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas - what ideas are for, what jobs they do.
The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.
I thought I wanted to be an inventor but then discovered you couldn't study inventing!
I don't enjoy the sound of my voice in front of other people.
I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.
Everything that we start is something that we don't know what the outcome is going to be.
I'm wary of the word 'inventing,' because in the British psyche the word 'inventor' is immediately linked with 'mad'. For me, inventing is problem-solving.
I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.
When you think about the worst places humans come into contact with, they are often our health environments.
I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.
I've always been interested in projects that work at multiple levels.
