Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.

I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.