In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.
I have always worked a bit with fashion people. I worked with Issey Miyake for a while, then Dolce & Gabbana; now we're working with Valentino. It's fine. The fashion world is a fairly weird world, but there are good people in it. It's weird because their timetables are unbearable.
I do quite like Gehry's Guggenheim. But where in Bilbao it's seen as an outgrowth of years of investment in urban design and engineering, in Britain it's seen as the catalyst for urban regeneration rather than the icing on the cake.
I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called 'FMR,' so we have a common interest in design.
