I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.

The idea for a building or an object can come up just as quick, but there is a big difference in process.

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'.

Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.

Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.

When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.