Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to "think outside the box." Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.

I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me.

If there's going to be another movement, another direction in architecture, it has to engage people differently. Other than saying, here, look at this, isn't this amazing? It has to interactively involve them other than as spectators ... it has to engage them as creators.

I'm not interested in living in a fantasy world ... All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.

If there is no idea in the drawing, there is no idea in the constructed project. That's the expression of the idea. Architects make drawings that other people build. I make the drawings. If someone wants to build from those, that's up to them. I feel I'm making architecture. I believe the building comes into being as soon as it's drawn.

Architecture is about ideas in the first place. You don't get to design until you have an idea.