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.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

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.

There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.

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.