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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.
The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been very widely aroused; and the broad line of its future development are already clearly discernible.
I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.
I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.
There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
My life and my work are very interlocked. That's partly why I like to keep my private life private.
I hate the idea of getting in a building that someone else has designed and having to do something to it yourself to sort of dress it up - it's like using presets in your tracks.
Anything I do informs how I design. I wouldn't isolate any one activity. Everything I do feeds back to my life, and my life is expressed in my work.
It's incredibly exciting to know people are using and living with the things I create.
I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.