A new icon is formed... not the predictable two-dimensional tower soaring skyward but a truly three-dimensional experience.
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.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands.
It is definitely a heart-felt, direct and personal engagement. What we are trying to do is re-imagine how Europe can be represented, how it can develop an iconography and a language that in a way re-inspires it.
It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
Seattle is an extreme of rationalism, Porto is an extreme of irrationalism, and CCTV is somewhere in-between: rational offices but with aesthetics. We wanted to make an unbelievably beautiful building.
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
The work in S,M,L,XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
What we have been successfully doing in the last five years is invading territories where we had not been invited.
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