What is the best moment of the day?
It used to be very late in the evening...
If I'm in London it can be different than if I‘m somewhere else.
What kind of music do you listen to at the moment?
Classic.
What books do you have on your bedside table?
None! No books at the moment.
Do you read design and architecture magazines?
We have lots of these magazines in the office but we usually don’t read them.
Where do you get news from?
Newspapers.
Are there any clothes that you avoid wearing?
Vintage clothing. Also I don’t like the masculine style, jeans.I like issey miyake,... and black dresses.
Do you have any pets?
No.
When you were a child, did you want to become an architect and designer?
Yes, since I was eleven years old.
Who would you like to design something for?
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas, that are expressed can be launched into society. With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture its not. I've also always been interested in combining architecture with a social agenda, and I really think you can invest and be inventive with hospitals and housing.
Do you discuss your work with other designers or architects?
Within the office of course.with other designers... I don't like to talk about myself so much. One discusses the ideas of friends.
Where do you usually work on your projects?
Anywhere. I don’t use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.
Describe your style as a good friend of yours might describe it.
Virtuoso of elegance. Personal investigation, research, it's laden with so many ideas that one cannot extrude a single one, there is no formal repertoire. Can I explain this? Two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. this exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interoperate the organization of space, its not infinite but it's very large. Imagine if you multiply that to the scale of a bigger space, and the to the scale of a city. Its like a pianist constantly practicing - it's the same level of intensity. it increases the repertoires immensely- its unpredictable. some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic. We produce many diagrams to start with and that's why we have a large repertoire.
Which of your projects has given you the most satisfaction?
‘The peak project’, because that was a very important departure for me. there are many, every time you make a discovery... I can’t really say because different projects give you satisfaction in different ways. The BMW centre in Leipzig and the phaeno science center in Wolfsburg, they were very exciting. I just went to see the contemporary arts centre in Rome which translates many ideas that I have been wanting to do.
Can you describe an evolution in your work?
There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much ‘a change’ but ‘a development’over the years.
