The rap on me on the street is the opposite - I'm impractical, I'm more expensive, it's too complicated and I run over budgets, which isn't true. None of that's true and there's plenty of documentation if anybody needs it.

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.