I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion.

I will always have two regrets. I don't have a presence in London, and I would have liked to have done more work in the Middle East.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.

There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.

It's not my duty as an architect to look at it.

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.