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I wanted to improve the suburban office building; to create a great urban space in a suburban environment with all that implies about interaction, collaboration and creativity.

In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.