You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around.

If you look at the Earth without architecture, its sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether its a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it.

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.