I spent more than ten years working on the Neues Museum. It was a wonderful experience, an example of real collaboration between architects, conservationists, curators, client, politicians, the media, and the public. Discussions, even when difficult, were always about ideas. Ideas matter to Germans. They're a reflective people. That's attractive.

Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don’t value architecture, we don’t take it seriously, we don’t want to pay for it and the architect isn’t trusted.

Often architects work too hard trying to make their buildings look different. It’s like we’re actors let loose on a stage, all speaking our parts at the same time in our own private languages without an audience.

It used to be presumed that if you weren't at your desk working, you weren't working. But we said, why can't we make a workplace where casual meetings are as important as working at your desk? Sometimes that's where your better creative work happens.

I may not be the most interesting architect, but I'm still out there and have maintained some position of integrity.

Most architects work in ­studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and ­historical ­research were irrelevant.

In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.