You can make people feel valued or cared for by design alone. It's not purely about money. It's about how we choose to value human experience.
Thomas Heatherwick
I try to be a positive person, but I'm also always looking and wondering, 'Maybe this could be done differently.' As soon as your mind is in a critical mode, you're halfway through designing; as soon as you start thinking about whether something could be better, you're already halfway through a solution.
I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways.
I don't feel I'm trying to make art. I'm trying to make interesting things. People can relate to that.
Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.
I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.
At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas - what ideas are for, what jobs they do.
One great building does not make a great city.
The Learning Hub is a collection of handmade concrete towers surrounding a central space that brings everyone together, interspersed with nooks, balconies and gardens for informal collaborative learning.
Our job is to get people in, create the spaces, and then get out of the way.
I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.
I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.
An interest in ideas is a sign of human life. People are fascinated by what the future is going to be - and the future is going to be an accumulation of ideas.
I used to say I'm not a business. I'm not! But I've had to come round to it, to acknowledge that you had to be an organisation and had to have a business dimension in order to do your passion.
I'm very interested in buildings that have meaning for a particular place. I suppose it feels slightly rude to me if the imposed style that lands in a place is almost stronger than the place. For me it's about inventing a solution for each place; if people then want to know who did it, then great.
For me, every one of our projects is a research-and-development project.
To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.
As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.
I don't enjoy the sound of my voice in front of other people.
Everything that we start is something that we don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Ambition is a form of creativity.
The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.
I've always been interested in projects that work at multiple levels.
I thought I wanted to be an inventor but then discovered you couldn't study inventing!
When I was little, I just was very tuned in to the functionality and aesthetics of things around me.
It gives me the creeps when I see a frame for a building going up and recognise the architect. You shouldn't know who a project is by.
When you think about the worst places humans come into contact with, they are often our health environments.
The studio does projects all over the world, and in each place, we focus on trying to make a project specific to that place. We take a different perspective everywhere we work - our passion is public projects, wherever they are.
When I heard of the 'garden bridge' idea, it seemed so clear and powerful, the notion of using nature to scale down an enormous piece of potentially wind-swept exposed link. That's what struck me - not treating the bridge just as a link, but as a place.
I'm wary of the word 'inventing,' because in the British psyche the word 'inventor' is immediately linked with 'mad'. For me, inventing is problem-solving.
Clearly I've got an ego.
I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from.
I am finally getting the chance to build large structures and break preconceptions that my designs are just sculptures for people to be in. But my work always comes down to the human scale.
It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.
Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.
My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.
The Garden Bridge has not found its right moment, but I hope one day it will and that London continues to be open to ideas that make life here better.
